An Empirical Study for Evaluating the Performance of jclouds

Multi-cloud APIs, such as jclouds, have been regarded as central players in achieving cloud portability and managing multiple clouds. Although their benefits, little is known about their performance. This is critical because applications can suffer performance degradation if the overhead created by a multi-cloud API is significantly larger than a platform specific API. Furthermore, if multi-cloud APIs prove not to be cost-effective, it can influence the selection of a solution for cloud portability. By carrying out two quasi-experiments, we identified that the performance of jclouds varies according to the cloud platform it targets. This finding contributes to the cloud community by showing a possible trade-off of multi-cloud APIs and providing a quantitative criterion to be analysed when adopting multiple cloud solutions.