The Impact of Virtualization on Network Performance of Amazon EC2 Data Center

Cloud computing services allow users to lease computing resources from large scale data centers operated by service providers. Using cloud services, users can deploy a wide variety of applications dynamically and on-demand. Most cloud service providers use machine virtualization to provide flexible and cost-effective resource sharing. However, few studies have investigated the impact of machine virtualization in the cloud on networking performance. This paper presents a measurement study to characterize the impact of virtualization on the networking performance of the Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) data center.