Application Splitting in the Cloud: A Performance Study

Cloud-based deployments have become more and more mainstream in recent years, with many companies evaluating moving their infrastructure to the cloud, whether a public cloud, a private cloud, or a mix of the two through the hybrid cloud concept. One service offered by many clouds providers is Database-as-a-Service, where a user is offered a direct endpoint and access credentials to a chosen type of database. In this paper, we evaluate the performance impact of application splitting in a Hybrid Cloud environment. In this context, the database may be located in a cloud setting and the application servers on another cloud or on-premises, or the other way around. We found that for applications with low database latency and throughput requirements, moving to a public cloud environment can be a cost saving solution. None of the cloud providers evaluated were able to provide comparable performance for database-heavy database applications when compared to an optimized enterprise environment. Evaluating application splitting, we conclude that bursting to the cloud is a viable option in most cases, provided that the data is moved to the cloud before performing the requests.