A free cloud-native benchmark designed and developed by the BenchmarkXPRT Development community
- Introduction
- CloudXPRT workloads
- Prerequisites
- Results and results submission
- Support
- Licensing and legal information
- Get involved with BenchmarkXPRT
CloudXPRT is a cloud benchmark that can accurately measure the performance of applications deployed on modern infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platforms, whether those platforms are paired with on-premises (datacenter), private cloud, or public cloud deployments. Applications increasingly use clouds in latency-critical, highly available, and high-compute scenarios, so we designed CloudXPRT to use cloud-native components on an actual stack to produce end-to-end performance metrics that can help users determine the right IaaS configuration for their businesses.
CloudXPRT
- is compatible with on-premises (datacenter), private, and public cloud deployments
- runs on top of cloud platform software such as Kubernetes and Docker
- supports multi-tier workloads
- reports relevant metrics including both throughput and critical latency for responsiveness-driven applications, and maximum throughput for applications dependent on batch processing
CloudXPRT currently includes two workloads that users can install and run independently: web microservices and data analytics. Testers can run CloudXPRT on local datacenter, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or Microsoft Azure deployments.
In the web microservices workload, a simulated user logs in to a web application that does three things: provides a selection of stock options, performs Monte-Carlo simulations with those stocks, and presents the user with options that may be of interest. This scenario enables the workload to model a traditional three-tier web application with services in the web, application, and data layers. The workload uses Kubernetes, Docker, NGNIX, REDIS, Cassandra, and monitoring modules to mimic an end-to-end IaaS scenario.
The workload reports performance in transactions per second, which reflects the number of successful requests per second the stack achieves for each level of concurrency. Testers can use this workload’s metrics to compare IaaS stack performance and to evaluate whether any given stack is capable of meeting SLA thresholds.
The CloudXPRT data analytics workload uses the gradient-boosting technique to classify a moderately large dataset with the XGBoost library. XGBoost is a gradient-boosting framework that data scientists often use for ML-based regression and classification problems. In the context of CloudXPRT, the purpose of the workload is to evaluate how well an IaaS stack enables XGBoost to speed and optimize model training. To do this, the data analytics workload uses Kubernetes, Docker, object storage, message pipeline, and monitorization components to mimic an end-to-end IaaS scenario.
The workload reports latency (response time in seconds in the 95th percentile) and throughput (jobs per minute) rates. Testers can use this workload’s metrics to compare IaaS stack performance and to evaluate whether any given stack is capable of meeting service-level agreement (SLA) thresholds.
We highly recommended running this benchmark on high end servers. While running, the benchmark will scale to utilize all the cores available. However, for functional testing, your physical node or VM must have at least:
- Web microservices on-premises testing - Ubuntu 20.04.2 or 22.04
- Web microservices CSP (AWS/Azure/GCP) testing - Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04.2, or 22.04
- Data analytics on-premises testing - Ubuntu 20.04.2
- Data analytics CSP (AWS/Azure/GCP) testing - Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04.2
- 16 logical or virtual CPUs
- 8 GB RAM
- 10 GB of available disk space (50 GB for the data analytics workload)
- an internet connection
For all target platforms—on-premises, AWS, Azure and GCP—testing requires both Docker and Kubernetes. The installation script takes care of this configuration. Off-premises tests require access to an AWS, Azure, or GCP account, depending on the test configuration.
When the web microservices workload is complete, the benchmark saves the results to CloudXPRT_vXXX_web-microservices/cnbrun/output in CSV format, along with a log file.
When the data analytics workload is complete, the benchmark saves the results to CloudXPRT_vXXX_data-analytics/cnbrun/results.csv in CSV format, generated by the command line –./cnb-analytics_parse-all-results.sh | sed -e 's/\s+/,/g' > results.csv. The log file will appear in the same folder.
To submit results to our page, please follow these instructions.
To see results published by the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community, visit CloudXPRT results page.
If you have any questions or comments about CloudXPRT, please feel free to contact a BenchmarkXPRT Development Community representative directly by sending a message to BenchmarkXPRTsupport@PrincipledTechnologies.com.
For legal and licensing information, please see the following file:
CloudXPRT is part of the BenchmarkXPRT suite of performance evaluation tools (the XPRTs), which includes AIXPRT, WebXPRT, CrXPRT, TouchXPRT, HDXPRT, and MobileXPRT. The XPRTs help people get the facts before they buy, use, or evaluate tech products such as servers, desktops, laptops, and tablets.
The XPRTs are developed by the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community, a diverse group that includes over 80 corporations and organizations representing major hardware manufacturers, chip vendors, and tech press leaders. The community provides members with the opportunity to contribute to the process of creating and improving the XPRTs. Community members can do all of the following and more:
- Submit comments, suggestions, questions, and concerns that inform the design of future benchmarks
- See the proposal for new versions of the tools and contribute comments for the final design
- Access and run previews of new benchmarks
- Submit source code for possible inclusion in the benchmarks and examine existing source code
We encourage you to add your voice to the XPRT mix. Participation is open to everyone, so get the details and join the community here. You can also contact a BenchmarkXPRT Development Community representative directly by sending a message to BenchmarkXPRTsupport@PrincipledTechnologies.com.
To learn more about the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community, view our benchmarks, browse test results, and much more, go to www.BenchmarkXPRT.com.