Virtualization in DC vs AWS
Without getting into the larger debate of private cloud vs public cloud for the organization as a whole, this document tries to give the numbers that let us make a fair comparison in terms of performance - and performance alone between AWS and Private Cloud through Openstack. The initial benchmarking and preparing these numbers stemmed out of the proposed DC migration to a west coast co-located DC at my current employer. The migration did not happen, but it gave us the opportunity to study the performance impact of having our own cloud. One of the gripes that I've had about our colo infra is that we never seem to have gotten grade-A processors. Almost all of the ones were hand-me-down servers or mid-level Intel Xeons, sometime with absurdly low clock speed. The storage side wasn't very brilliant either. This was solved when we obtained a test bed from Dell with the latest and greatest hardware in their lab that we could setup and run benchmarks on. The machine we got w