Working with Srikanth Kandula and Ming Zhang of Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, Yang and Li have developed a suite of benchmarking tools that make it possible to compare the performance of different cloud platforms without moving applications between them. These tools use algorithms to measure the speed of computation, and shuttle data around to test the speed at which new copies of an application are created, the speed at which data can be stored and retrieved, the speed at which it can be shuttled between applications inside the same cloud, and the responsiveness of a cloud to network requests from distant places.
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They are building software that captures the performance of an application when running on a local server and then creates a dummy version of it on several clouds to compare how they hold up. The dummy doesn't actually perform the function of the software, but it exerts the same computational, storage, and network demands. "Without actually migrating the app, I could just try out that representation of what it does," says Yang.
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/25815/page1/
