IaaS Performance Benchmarks Part 3: AWS C3

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Joe Masters Emison.

This is the third part in a series of articles about creating my own IaaS performance benchmarking project. In the first part, I explained the methodology I’m using to test instance types across major IaaS providers. In the second part, I ran benchmarks across every instance type in every U.S. region run by Amazon Web Services (AWS), the most widely used IaaS provider. In this part, I look specifically at the new C3 family of instances that AWS launched at its re:Invent conference, and update my AWS charts accordingly.

Amazon Web Services has been around long enough to want to deprecate/retire some of its instance types, as seen both by the excellent M3 family (replacing the M1 instance types) and now the new C3 family (replacing the C1 instances). As AWS giveth, however, AWS also (to some extent) taketh away: While these new families are far superior than the old ones in terms of price/performance, they also eliminate an option that the old instance types had: instance-backed storage…

You must use Elastic Block Storage (EBS) backing for the new families, which means that each instance has two single points of failure: the hardware/power/networking behind both EBS and the compute resources. That said, as long as you’re properly architecting for the cloud (read: architecting for failure, distributed systems), this shouldn’t be an issue, and the benefits far outweigh that downside…

Read more from the source @ http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/iaas-performance-benchmarks-part-3-aws-c/240164236