An Evaluation of Amazon's Grid Computing Services: EC2, S3, and SQS

Abstract

Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3) and Simple Queue Service (SQS) offer enterprise-class computing, storage and coordination facilities to any organization or individual in the world with a valid credit card. This paper details our experience working with these commodity grid computing services between November 2006 and May 2007, including an analysis of the overall system’s API and ease-of-use; an analysis of EC2’s management and security facilities; an end-to-end performance analysis of S3’s throughput and latency as observed from Amazon’s EC2 cluster and other locations on the Internet; and an analysis of the SQS operation and performance. We conclude with a report of our experience moving a large-scale re-search application from dedicated hardware to the Amazon offering. We find that this collection of Amazon Web Services (AWS) has great promise but are hobbled by service consistency problems, the lack of a Service Level Agreement (SLA), and a problematic Web Services Licensing Agreement (WSLA).