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Cloud service benchmarking : measuring quality of cloud services from a client perspective
Bermbach D., Wittern E., Tai S., Springer International Publishing, New York, NY, 2017. 167 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319554-82-2)
Date Reviewed: Dec 22 2017

Cloud computing is now quite well known. As in the case of some other technologies and product innovations related to computing (for example, blockchain or the World Wide Web), it has been driven largely by industry, with very limited contributions from academics and researchers. As with those other topics, cloud computing is also largely free of a core base of standard theory and runs mostly on some industry approaches and best practices. It is only after cloud computing has become widely accepted that there is work on retrofitting a certain amount of theory and on developing suitable standards by organizations like the IEEE and the ISO.

Lack of standardization in cloud computing has meant that there are serious difficulties with portability and interoperability: it is rarely easy to port one’s data (or derived service) from one cloud vendor to another, and it is also typically not possible to mix and use (parts of) different vendors’ offerings.

One issue, but not the only one of significance, is that defining suitable metrics for the quality of cloud services is not easy. Cloud computing works over large networked domains and provides significant computing resources; it therefore inherits the frailties and difficulties associated with both domains--networking and computation.

It is in this context that this book, which deals with the benchmarking of certain currently common cloud service offerings, has its place. The book seems to be derived from the 2014 doctoral thesis of its first author and other published work by him and his fellow authors.

While benchmarking is well known in other contexts, particularly for measuring central processing unit (CPU) speeds (as with the Whetstone and Dhrystone benchmarks, among others), it is relatively new in the context of cloud services. Quality of service (QoS) benchmarks are, however, needed for organizations using cloud services, to ensure that their choices of cloud vendors meet their business needs and their customers’ expectations.

The book is divided into five parts: “Fundamentals” (four chapters); “Benchmark Design” (three chapters); “Benchmark Execution” (two chapters); “Benchmark Results” (four chapters); and “Conclusions” (two chapters). Although it does not go into much theoretical depth, and also does not dive into the deeper aspects of practical cloud deployments and benchmarking, it gives a good overview, in broad brushstrokes, of the topics it deals with.

A general problem that applies to much contemporary work on cloud benchmarking, which this book does not clearly address, is that benchmarks focused on technical QoS (for example, bandwidth, uptime, and latency) may not be good predictors of the functional QoS, also known as “quality of experience,” as perceived by the client or end user [1]. A specific issue with the presentation in this book is that some important cloud vendors and their offerings (for example, Rackspace and Microsoft Azure) seem to have been missed entirely, and the coverage of the relevant published literature [2,3,4], as well as of tools dealing with cloud benchmarking (for example, COSBench, HiBench, AzureBench, and Cloud Suite), is also somewhat lacking. Although readers will find this book a handy introduction to its topic, they would also be well advised to consult other sources for additional information that may be useful to them.

More reviews about this item: Amazon

Reviewer:  Shrisha Rao Review #: CR145727 (1802-0032)
1) Khasnabish, J. N.; Mithani, M. F.; Rao, S. Tier-centric resource allocation in multi-tier cloud systems. IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing 5, 3(2017), 576–589.
2) Hwang, K.; Bai, X.; Shi, Y.; Li, M.; Chen, W.-G.; Wu, Y. Cloud performance modeling with benchmark evaluation of elastic scaling strategies. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems 27, 1(2016), 130–143.
3) Varghese, B.; Akgun, O.; Miguel, I.; Thai, L.; Barker, A. Cloud benchmarking for performance. In Proc. of the 6th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom '14). IEEE, 2014, 535–540.
4) Iosup, A.; Prodan, R.; Epema, D. IaaS cloud benchmarking: approaches, challenges, and experience. In Proc. of the 2013 International Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Services (HotTopiCS '13). ACM, 2013, 1–2.
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