Google's announcements of its new performance tool in its cloud platform blog has not come as a surprise to anyone as there was a big market gap in this area for long time. For the programmers developing applications, performance is the number one issue, therefore evaluating cloud offerings has always been difficult.
Google has admitted that when they looked at how their own users could measure the relative performance of Google Cloud Platform, "it was clear they struggled with this exact problem."
Google then started collecting feedback from several different sources including academia, cloud providers, and experts to further evaluate the situation and came up with a cloud performance benchmarking framework which they call PerfKitBenchmarker. Google claim with this tool "You'll now have a way to easily benchmark across cloud platforms, while getting a transparent view of application throughput, latency, variance, and overhead."
Google also created a visualisation tool to help the customers interpret the results on dashboards. Releasing the source code under the ASLv2 license, tool is open for contributors to collaborate and maintain a balanced set of benchmarks. Contributors can participate through github If they want something to be removed or added.
Perfkit tool will be continuously updated with the technological advances and changes. Google says
"we'll adapt PerfKit to keep it current. It already includes several well-known benchmarks, and covers common cloud workloads that can be executed across multiple cloud providers."
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