AGENDA

Cloudstone: Multi-Platform, Multi-Language Benchmark and Measurement tools for Web 2.0

Armando Fox, Will Sobel, Hubert Wong, Jimmy Nguyen, Shanti Subramanyam, Akara Sucharitakul, Sheetal Patil, David Patterson

Abstract: Web 2.0 applications place different demands on servers than their Web 1.0 counterparts: many-to-many user rela-tionships, richer GUI’s, and user-contributed content vs. unidirectional “publishing to the masses.” Simultaneously, the definitive arrival of pay-as-you-go “cloud computing” and the proliferation of development stacks for software-as-a-service presents a different collection of degrees of free-dom in deployment and tuning. To help explore this new space, we identify a number of non-obvious challenges and caveats to performing “apples-to-apples” comparisons of Web 2.0 application deployments. To help explore this space quantitatively, we offer Cloudstone, an open-source suite distributed as a set of virtual machine images compris-ing three implementations of a Web 2.0-representative ap-plication (Rails, PHP, Java EE) and a Markov-based distrib-uted workload generator and data collection tools. To illus-trate its usefulness we present preliminary measurements on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Sun’s Niagara 2 enter-prise server, discussing the challenges of comparing plat-forms or software stacks and how Cloudstone can help quantify the differences.