Amazon EC2 Cloud Comparison Performance Benchmarks

As it's been nearly one year since we last put out some reference benchmarks of Amazon's EC2 Cloud, or compared the different operating system's in Amazon's cloud, it's time to kick off a new round of cloud performance benchmarks. Coming out today are new benchmarks of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud when benchmarking various on-demand instance types.

For reference purposes and to gauge the current performance of Amazon EC2, in this article are benchmark results when comparing the m1.small, m1.medium, m1.large, m1.xlarge, and m3.xlarge instance types.

Using the industry-supported Phoronix Test Suite testing software, you can easily run your own comparison benchmarks against these numbers directly whether it is of another cloud service or from bare metal hardware itself. With having the Phoronix Test Suite installed on Linux / OS X / Solaris / BSD, it's simply a matter of running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1309189-SO-EC2AMAZON56. The command will download all of the technical data pertaining to the Phoronix tests carried out, download the specific tests carried out and set them up in the same exact manner, and then proceed to run the many different benchmarks in the same manner as we did -- while all being fully automated and reproducible.

Using the Phoronix Test Suite has been very popular by many organizations within the cloud and by sharing results on OpenBenchmarking.org it leads to an even more collaborative and beneficial process. Our open-source (GPLv3) testing software makes cloud benchmarking very straightforward and sets up the automation processes that can adapt to any organizations needs.

The Amazon EC2 cloud instances we're sharing benchmarks from today were all running the latest Amazon Linux 64-bit AMI instance. Amazon Linux AMI 2013.03 ships with the Linux 3.4.43 kernel, GCC 4.6.3, and uses an EXT4 file-system by default. The cloud was within Amazon's us-east-1a data center. The tested virtual server types were:

M1 Small - m1.small - 1 ECU / 1 Core / 1.7GB RAM / $0.060 per Hour

M1 Medium - m1.medium - 2 ECU / 1 Core / 3.7GB RAM / $0.120 per Hour

M1 Large - m1.large - 4 ECU / 2 Cores / 7.5GB RAM / $0.240 per Hour

M1 Extra Large - m1.xlarge - 8 ECUs / 4 Cores / 15GB RAM / $0.480 per Hour

M3 Extra Large - m3.xlarge - 13 ECUs / 4 Cores / 15GB RAM / $0.500 per Hour

The CPUs powering the EC2 cloud were a range of Intel Xeon processors as indicated below in the system table that's auto-generated by the Phoronix Test Suite software.

With the 1309189-SO-EC2AMAZON56 result file are a range of CPU, memory, and disk benchmarks. On the following pages are the benchmark results, which should be very straightforward and the results should be rather obvious with the larger virtual systems boasting a greater number of Elastic Compute Units doing the best. The results are mainly for reference purposes and for those wanting to run their own performance comparisons to see how their hardware/cloud stacks up against the latest from Amazon. A comparison of different AMIs / operating systems in the Amazon EC2 cloud is forthcoming.