Cloud capacity clarity is needed

Transparency and standardisation will boost the power of partners in the cloud, says Antonio Miguel Ferreira

The need for transparency in cloud has been a hot topic ever since cloud began to go mainstream. Most of the calls for it concern data security, privacy and service levels, but the debate about transparency needs to go further.

Currently, there is no common standard to express what CPU performance is being delivered to customers. Most people know that a gigabyte is the standard measure for RAM or disk capacity - and such a unit is pretty clear and comparable across providers.

When it comes to CPU, one provider may be offering one instance of a certain CPU unit whereas another might be offering a multiple of another CPU unit. A customer might think the latter delivers a comparably increased level of processing power but that might not be true. Amazon AWS’s Elastic Compute Units have a capacity equivalent to 1GHz-1.2GHz Opteron or Xeon processor circa 2007. Rackspace, on the other hand, does not mention CPU allocations in its server configurations at all.

Worse, many providers do not even disclose what kind of processing power they are selling to their customers.

Meanwhile, a recent Cloud Industry Forum poll has suggested that many users seek confidence and clarity when it comes to cloud.

There are ramifications for the providers as well as for customers. Providers have more difficulty comparing themselves to competitors and they themselves struggle to understand where their service sits in the market.

This confusion and lack of standardisation is indicative of the cloud industry as a whole.

Unfortunately, the industry has not been able to play catch-up and introduce common standards where customers need them the most. It will be at least two or three years before we see an industry-standard measurement of CPU performance introduced, possibly by an independent organisation such as the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.

Until standards exist, cloud infrastructure providers need to make sure they are communicating accurately and transparently what they deliver in terms of CPU capacity, as well as all the other IT resources they provide.

Unfortunately, all customers can do until then is test the CPU themselves and push for standardisation because this is something that will benefit everybody. Customers or their resellers can run various tests themselves, such as a timed Linux 3.1 kernel compilation or parallel BZIP2 compression of a 256MB file, using POSIX threads.

Customers should also benchmark providers against each other, using independent third parties. This kind of analysis is currently not performed by most end customers.

Otherwise, how do end users know what they are getting?

Antonio Miguel Ferreira is chief executive officer of Lunacloud and managing director of Claranet Portugal