Performance Analysis of a Java Web Application Running on Amazon EC2

Abstract

More and more companies decide to deploy their new or existing applications at cloud computing providers. A few of the most important forces driving this process are the scalability, business agility and mobility offered by the cloud environments. A number of issues, however, tend to inhibit the adoption of cloud based systems, e.g. security, compliance, vendor lock-in, or inconsistent performance. This paper focuses on the performance questions of a web application implemented on Java platform, deployed at the servers of Amazon Web Services, which is considered one of the dominant cloud providers currently. We present the results of a load testing that investigates the throughput and response time of the application on two different types of instances (Micro and Small) with different computing power and price. We quantify the effect on the user-perceived performance when choosing either of these instance types.