Google Perfkit Sets ‘Benchmark’ For Cloud Applications. WHAT’S NEXT?
By Aziz Mohammed Senior Director
Google Perfkit eases developers to evaluate performances of Google, AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud computing services, and determines the best cloud platform for your app.
Many companies and application providers have been developing several applications on cloud, but hitherto there wasn’t any tool to measure the performance of such applications. However, here’s some good news for cloud application developers! On February 11, 2015, Google launched its new tool called “PerfKit Benchmarker” to evaluate cloud computing performance of various applications.
Google worked with over 30 researchers, companies and customers in developing the tool. Some of the companies include Cisco, CenturyLink, Broadcom, ARM, Microsoft, Red Hat, Qualcomm Technologies Inc., Intel, Rackspace, Canonical, CloudHarmony, Mellanox, Tradeworx Inc., Thesys Technologies LLC, CloudSpectator, and EcoCloud.
‘PerfKit Benchmarker’, an open source tool for benchmarking cloud, helps developers provide easy benchmark across cloud platforms, while allowing them to get a transparent view of application throughput, latency, variance and overhead. PerfKit is unique since it measures the end-to-end time to provision resources in the cloud, apart from reporting standard metrics of peak performance. It is designed to operate through vendor-provided command-line tools. It includes several popular benchmarks and comprises common cloud workloads that can be executed across multiple cloud providers. With PerfKit, latest workloads of organizations can be measured, which ensure organizations make more informed decisions about their infrastructure requirements. The PerfKit tools presently support Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure clouds, and Google’s own Compute Engine.
Apart from PerfKit Benchmarker, Google also launched ‘PerfKit Explorer’, a new dashboarding and performance analysis tool to aid developers in interpreting benchmark results. Comparison of different cloud services has been made difficult because of different metrics used by providers. Google’s new tool will particularly enable organizations to compare virtual machines and object storage across clouds. It automates several workloads such as Hadoop, Cassandra, SpecCPU, Aerospike, and micro-benchmarks such as iperf and netperf.
This just goes to show that while cloud adoption could now be considered as matured, there are still challenges in maintaining uniform performance standards across different platforms. While this tool provides great insights to help developers with choosing execution centers, I believe its real value is in the horizon. Given that this is open source, companies that can integrate this into their customized single-pane multi-cloud orchestrator and management platforms will benefit from the results of automating the selection of best execution cloud platform for each workload in real-time. If you are looking to work PerfKit into your cloud management processes, or integrate it with your cloud orchestrator for automated cloud platform selection, or just to get a better understanding of PerfKit, then talk to us at ExterNetworks. We will be happy to discuss any question you might have.
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