Internet Traffic Characteristics of Virtual Machine on Amazon EC2

概要

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Cloud computing has attracted a great deal of attention and provides users to acquire computing resources from data centers. Platforms typically do not permit access to actual physical machines but rely on virtualization technologies. Amazon EC2 is a popular cloud service, and provides the platform as an instance to users. However, virtualization technologies can impair communication performance. We found `oversize packet spacing', which can be caused by CPU scheduling latency, was a major cause of throughput instability on PlanetLab. The oversize packet spacings are anomalies on virtualized network environments. Moreover, large delay variations and unstable TCP/UDP throughput were reported on Amazon EC2. However, they used their monitoring program only and focused on the characteristics among the instances. We choose the instance as a sender node and a native node as a receiver node. To understand Internet traffic characteristics and to observe the anomalies, we simultaneously measured both network throughput and resource states by using monitoring program offered by Amazon. In the results, very few of packet spacings are the anomalies, and it is hard to determine a major cause of throughput instability. Moreover, CPU utilization is stable during the throughput measurements. Finally, we show that packet loss is occurred continuously although RTT is very similar to mean RTT using ping.
2011-04-06