Leading Public Clouds – Storage Performance Benchmark

SOFIA, Bulgaria, May 28, 2019 – StorPool Storage announced the results from a public cloud performance measurement report, focusing on shared block-storage services of several providers. The public clouds which are benchmarked are Amazon AWS, Digital Ocean, DreamHost, OVH, ToggleBox, eApps and other. The tests are comparing storage systems/offerings, not other aspects, like VM sizes and plans.

7 virtual machines (VMs), with identical parameters (8 vCPUs, 16GB RAM) and various pricing (priced $69 to $188), were procured by StorPool from all tested clouds. Further StorPool procured 7 identical block storage volumes from each of these providers and attached them as virtual disks to the VMs that were being tested.

4 different types of tests were performed:

  1. PGBENCH – a PostgreSQL database benchmark, perhaps closest to actual application performance
  2. Sysbench/mysql – a second database benchmark for control of PGBENCH results, MySQL based
  3. fio – a set of synthetic benchmarks — random reads/writes, sequential reads/writes, latency measurements
  4. rsync – copying files and syncing, simulating rapid deployment and backup workloads

In the FULL REPORT you can read more about the testing methodology and detailed results.

Results Summary
The results from the tests show significant difference between the offerings of the benchmarked public clouds, in all meaningful metrics – latency (the number 1 metric of any cloud), IOPS, MB/s and price.

Conclusions
Few conclusions are drawn from the tests:

  • Most shared-storage offerings you can get in a public cloud are painfully slow for running databases and demanding apps, with a few exceptions
  • Offerings which are the same on paper, perform very, very differently. Ranging from “is this thing working at all”, to “Just WOW”
  • There is several fold difference in the price of the seemingly same service
  • The difference in price performance of shared storage services is even higher than the variance in price or the variance in performance alone
  • Surprisingly, nor the best price, nor the best price-performance ratios are not found in the most popular services on the market

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