Challenges on Amazon Cloud in Load Balancing, Performance Testing and Upgrading

Abstract

Web application hosting in a data centre is clouded with quite a few issues ranging from hardware provisioning, software installation and maintaining the servers. Traditional data-centre techniques need production grade hardware to test application’s behavior/performance under expected peak load. This could be costly and procuring hardware could be very time consuming causing delays in software delivery. Cloud (Infrastructure-as-a- Service) can be an answer to this. Cloud Computing provides production grade server instances at very cheap rates.

This whitepaper is divided into two sub parts: first part details out the typical web application setup on Amazon Web Services cloud (AWS) [Ref 2], challenges faced during the setup and resolution for the same, while the second part talks about the observations made during load testing using Apache JMeter performance testing tool on AWS cloud. Three different application setup topologies (single tier, two tier and three tier) are tested and findings and learning from it are discussed here.

This whitepaper only highlights the pitfalls encountered and possible resolutions for each and is not a comment on performance of Amazon cloud. The whitepaper endeavors to find out the best architecture which would give maximum return on investment.