Executive Summary
Cloud computing continues to play an increasingly important role for IT organizations in 2014. In partnership with Cloud Spectator, Gigaom Research conducted research to determine how three major cloud providers — Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace Cloud — perform with regards to processor and memory.
The three providers were tested using Geekbench 3 standardized tests over a three-day period of time. Individual test results proved a variability of as much as 25 percent. The complex of variables between cloud providers beyond just processor and memory can contribute heavily to this variability in results. Tests were conducted over a three-day period to normalize the results. With each provider, different configurations of each solution were tested to demonstrate the variability and value between configurations. In addition, the provider’s updated hardware configurations were used to ensure currency.
It should be noted that the tests in this research focused on the performance of processor and memory only. There are a number of other variables (network, architecture, etc) that can vary the results for a specific application or service.
See the latest research report on processor performance in IaaS, published in partnership with GigaOm.