C-MART: Benchmarking the Cloud

Cloud computing environments provide on-demand resource provisioning, allowing applications to elastically scale. However, application benchmarks currently being used to test cloud management systems are not designed for this purpose. This results in resource underprovisioning and quality-of-service (QoS) violations when systems tested using these benchmarks are deployed in production environments. We present C-MART, a benchmark designed to emulate a modern web application running in a cloud computing environment. It is designed using the cloud computing paradigm of elastic scalability at every application tier and utilizes modern web-based technologies such as HTML5, AJAX, jQuery, and SQLite. C-MART consists of a web application, client emulator, deployment server, and scaling API. The deployment server automatically deploys and configures the test environment in orders of magnitude less time than current benchmarks. The scaling API allows users to define and provision their own customized datacenter. The client emulator generates the web workload for the application by emulating complex and varied client behaviors, including decisions based on page content and prior history. We show that C-MART can detect problems in management systems that previous benchmarks fail to identify, such as an increase from 4.4 to 50 percent error in predicting server CPU utilization and resource underprovisioning in 22 percent of QoS measurements.