University of Amsterdam Faculty of Physics, Mathematics and Informatics MSc System and Network Engineering Research Project 2 Collecting, cataloguing and searching performance information of Cloud resources. February 17, 2017 Author: Supervisors: Olaf Elzinga dr. ir. Arie Taal dr. Zhiming Zhao Abstract When deploying an application in the cloud, a developer often wants to know which of the wide variety of cloud resources is best to use. Most cloud providers only provide static infor- mation about different cloud resources which is often not enough because static information does not take into account the hardware and software that is being used or the policy that has been applied by the cloud provider. Therefore, dynamic benchmarking of cloud resources is needed to find out how a certain workload load is going to behave on a certain instance. However, benchmarking various cloud resources is a time consuming process. Thus, using a tool which automatically benchmarks various cloud resources will be of great use. To maximize the effectiveness of such a tool, it will be helpful to maintain an up to date cloud information catalogue, so that users can share and compare their benchmark results to the results of other users. In this paper we present the Cloud Performance Collector, a modular cloud benchmark- ing tool aimed to automatically benchmark a wide variety of applications. To demonstrate the benefit of the tool we did three experiments with three synthetic benchmark applications and one real-world application using the ExoGENI testbed. During the experiments we focused on measuring variation in performance when a new VM is provisioned and when the same VM is used over a longer period of time. We found out that most ExoGENI instances perform very stable over time, however there can be some difference in performance when a new VM instance is provisioned.