A benchmarking framework for evaluating cloud services: A case study on azure app service vs DOCKER container

For many reasons, comparing two or more services on the cloud and deciding which "is better" is a challenging job. The current benchmarking solutions lack efficiency when it comes to running the test process on the cloud, and they are difficult to configure for tailored test cases and specifying the structure of the resulted data. The cloud environment's special characteristics (like distributed nature, variation in resources' capacity, virtualization, security, and cost) made it an interesting subject for many recent studies. This research suggests that the cloud benchmarking framework needs to have cloud-benchmarking-related features like comparability, coverage, configurability, plasticity, and comprehensiveness. These characteristics are considered in this research while proposing a benchmarking framework that is customized to have its best outputs in the cloud environment. It's designed in client-server model where the server is a service that runs the load on the subject node, and the client is responsible for controlling the test and generating the output data. A demo application is implemented to test the validity of the proposed framework, and it is used to compare the performance of Azure App Service with Azure Docker Container. The test is conducted to benchmark different resources -including CPU, Memory, File I/O, and network- on the subject nodes (App Service and Docker container), and the resulting data revealed that Docker Container has better performance -in general- than App Service on Azure for the same cloud tier.