Good Performance Metrics for Cloud Service Brokers

The large number of Cloud Infrastructure Providers offering virtual machines in a variety sizes, but without transparent performance descriptions,makes price/performance comparisons difficult.This presents opportunities for Cloud Service Brokers (CSBs). A CSB could offer transparent price/performance comparisons, or performance discovery. This paper explores the kinds of performance measures such CSBs should use. Using three quite different benchmarks, povray, bzip2 and STREAM, we show a 17%, 77% and a 340% increase in performance,respectively, from worst to best in an existing large Cloud. Based on these results, we propose a discovery service for best price/performance for use in aggregation of heterogeneous resources