The Impact of Virtualization on Network Performance of Amazon EC2 Data Center

TLDR

Cloud computing lets users lease resources from large data centers, enabling dynamic application deployment, but few studies have examined how virtualization affects networking performance. The study aims to characterize how virtualization impacts networking performance in Amazon EC2. The authors measured processor sharing, packet delay, TCP/UDP throughput, and packet loss among EC2 virtual machines. The results reveal that virtualization induces significant throughput instability and abnormal delay variations even on lightly utilized networks, with implications for various application classes.

Abstract

Cloud computing services allow users to lease computing resources from large scale data centers operated by service providers. Using cloud services, users can deploy a wide variety of applications dynamically and on-demand. Most cloud service providers use machine virtualization to provide flexible and cost-effective resource sharing. However, few studies have investigated the impact of machine virtualization in the cloud on networking performance. In this paper, we present a measurement study to characterize the impact of virtualization on the networking performance of the Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) data center. We measure the processor sharing, packet delay, TCP/UDP throughput and packet loss among Amazon EC2 virtual machines. Our results show that even though the data center network is lightly utilized, virtualization can still cause significant throughput instability and abnormal delay variations. We discuss the implications of our findings on several classes of applications.