Performance Testing Web Applications on the Cloud

Web applications are increasingly resorting to public cloud platforms such as the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). However, previous studies have shown that the virtualized infrastructures used in a cloud environment can introduce performance issues. Hence, it is crucial to test the performance of the cloud to support Web applications. This is challenging because the performance effect of the cloud platform cannot be easily isolated from other extraneous factors. In this paper, we present a systematic experimental process to address this challenge. Following our proposed process, we test the performance of Web applications running on different types of AWS EC2 instances. Results suggest that Web server response times can fluctuate up to 1000% for the same workload under certain circumstances such as instance type, time-of-the-day, and day-of-the-week.