Empirical Evaluation of Latency-Sensitive Application Performance in the Cloud

Cloud computing platforms enable users to rent computing and storage resources on-demand to run their networked applications and employ virtualization to multiplex virtual servers belonging to different customers on a shared set of servers. In this paper, the authors empirically evaluate the efficacy of cloud platforms for running latency-sensitive multimedia applications. Since multiple virtual machines running disparate applications from independent users may share a physical server, the study focuses on whether dynamically varying background load from such applications can interfere with the performance seen by latency-sensitive tasks.