A query, a minute: Evaluating performance isolation in cloud databases

Abstract

Several cloud providers offer reltional databases as part of their portfolio. It is however not obvious how resource virtualization and sharing, which is inherent to cloud computing, influence performance and predictability of these cloud databases. Cloud providers give little to no guarantees for consistent execution or isolation from other users. To evaluate the performance isolation capabilities of two commercial cloud databases, we ran a series of experiments over the course of a week (a query, a minute) and report variations in query response times. As a baseline, we ran the same experiments on a dedicated server in our data center. The results show that in the cloud single outliers are up to 31 times slower than the average. Additionally, one can see a point in time after which the average performance of all executed queries improves by 38%.