Cloud beats physical infrastructure if configuration is right

Businesses deploying applications to the cloud must consider the optimal configuration for their requirements just as much as when using conventional infrastructure, according to a new report from consultancy firm Intechnica.

The How Fast is the Cloud? report found that cloud applications can match physical server infrastructure on performance, but that the performance may vary widely, depending not just on the cloud platform chosen, but whether users select the optimal services and configuration to meet their requirements.

The upshot of the report is that customers should be prepared to experiment to get the best level of performance, and take advantage of any expertise on offer from their cloud service provider, rather than simply porting an application to the cloud and hoping for the best.

Intechnica's results come from tests comparing an e-commerce application running on a physical server in a conventional hosting environment with the same application running on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Microsoft's Azure, and a public cloud based on VMware's vSphere platform.

The findings indicate that cloud platforms can pretty much match the response time offered by physical servers, with the exception of the Amazon deployment, which achieved an average response time of about 2ms compared with about 0.7ms for the physical server.

However, Intechnica found that performance could be improved by configuring the application to use Amazon's cloud-based Relational Database Service instead of an EC2-based instance of SQL Server.

"Cloud providers are experts on scalability, and the services they provide are based on those used to power their own systems," the report states, advising cloud users to make full use of these.