A few months
ago, we wrote about the possibility of creating a datacenter XPRT. In the
intervening time, we’ve discussed the idea with folks both in and outside of the
XPRT Community. We’ve heard from vendors of datacenter products, hosting/cloud
providers, and IT professionals that use those products and services.
The common
thread that emerged was the need for a cloud benchmark that can accurately
measure the performance of modern, cloud-first applications deployed on modern infrastructure
as a service (IaaS) platforms, whether those platforms are on-premises, hosted
elsewhere, or some combination of the two (hybrid clouds). Regardless of where
clouds reside, applications are increasingly using them in latency-critical,
highly available, and high-compute scenarios.
Existing
datacenter benchmarks do not give a clear indication of how applications will
perform on a given IaaS infrastructure, so the benchmark should use cloud-native
components on the actual stacks used for on-prem and public cloud management.
We are planning to call the benchmark CloudXPRT. Our goal is for CloudXPRT to address the needs described above while also including the elements that have made the other XPRTs successful. We plan for CloudXPRT to
- Be relevant to on-prem (datacenter), private, and public cloud
deployments
- Run on top of cloud platform software such as Kubernetes
- Include multiple workloads that address common scenarios like web
applications, AI, and media analytics
- Support multi-tier workloads
- Report relevant metrics including both throughput and critical
latency for responsiveness-driven applications and maximum throughput for
applications dependent on batch processing
CloudXPRT’s
workloads will use cloud-native components on an actual stack to provide
end-to-end performance metrics that allow users to choose the best IaaS
configuration for their business.
We’ve been
building and testing preliminary versions of CloudXPRT for the last few months.
Based on the progress so far, we are shooting to have a Community Preview of
CloudXPRT ready in mid- to late-March with a version for general availability ready
about two months later.
Over the
coming weeks, we’ll be working on getting out more information about CloudXPRT
and continuing to talk with interested parties about how they can help. We’d
love to hear what workflows would be of most interest to you and what you would
most like to see in a datacenter/cloud benchmark. Please feel free to contact us!
Bill
