Early Observations on the Performance of Windows Azure

A significant open issue in cloud computing is the real performance of the infrastructure. Few, if any, cloud providers or technologies offer quantitative performance guarantees. Regardless of the potential advantages of the cloud in comparison to enterprise-deployed applications, cloud infrastructures may ultimately fail if deployed applications cannot predictably meet behavioral requirements. In this paper, we present the results of comprehensive performance experiments we conducted on Windows Azure from October 2009 to February 2010. In general, we have observed good performance of the Windows Azure mechanisms, although the average 10 min VM startup time must be accounted for in application design. We also present performance and reliability observations and analysis from our deployment of a large-scale scientific application hosted on Azure, called ModisAzure, that show unusual and sporadic VM execution slowdown of over 4× in some cases and affected up to 16% of task executions at times. In addition to a detailed performance evaluation of Windows Azure, we provide recommendations for potential users of Windows Azure based on these early observations. Although the discussion and analysis is tailored to scientific applications, the results are broadly applicable to the range of existing and future applications running in Windows Azure.