5-Way Amazon EC2 Cloud Linux OS Benchmarks

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4, Amazon Linux AMI 2013.09, Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu 13.10, and SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 have been pitted against each other in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and the Linux performance benchmark results are now available.

My latest Amazon EC2 benchmarks were from September when comparing various EC2 instance types for performance. Those benchmarks compared various EC2 instances running the Amazon Linux AMI and we looked at how these cloud instances compared to bare-metal hardware. In this article we're using an m3.xlarge instance and comparing five different Linux-based operating systems in the cloud.

The m3.xlarge instance type was used during benchmarking and it features four virtual CPUs, is rated for 13 ECU compute power, 15GB of RAM, EBS-only instance storage, and moderate network performance. The Amazon m3.xlarge instance type costs during testing were $0.45 USD per hour. For each m3.xlarge instance we used they were all powered by Intel Xeon E5-2670 2.6GHz processors. Amazon is still using the Xen 3.4.3 hypervisor in the formation of its highly-popular cloud platform.

The AMIs we used for testing were the featured 64-bit Linux operating systems prominently advertised for Amazon's cloud: Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu 13.10, SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, Amazon Linux AMI 2013.09, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4. The 64-bit versions of all operating systems were used during testing and each operating system was left with its stock settings. All benchmarking was handled in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking platform.