Characterizing the impact of network latency on cloud-based applications’ performance

Businesses and individuals run increasing numbers of applications in the cloud. The performance of an application running in the cloud depends on the data center conditions and upon the resources committed to an application. Small network delays may lead to a significant performance degradation, which affects both the user’s cost and the service provider’s resource usage, power consumption and data center efficiency. In this work, we quantify the effect of network latency on several typical cloud workloads, varying in complexity and use cases. Our results show that different applications are affected by network latency to differing amounts. These insights into the effect of network latency on different applications have ramifications for workload placement and physical host sharing when trying to reach performance targets