At present, there are many kinds of cloud server products on the market, including Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Baidu Cloud, Huawei Cloud, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS and other cloud server manufacturers that we are familiar with. In addition to some large factories, the quality of cloud servers in small factories is uneven, This also causes many non professionals to encounter various problems when choosing ECS for related business.

Once on the cloud, can not stop. Because ECS does not require operation and maintenance personnel to maintain the computer room, nor does it require enterprises or individuals to pull network cables, set up the computer room, pay electricity bills and other issues, ECS providers often provide a complete set of solutions to help users quickly achieve business deployment.

In addition, elastic ECS is also a mainstream cloud server solution launched by various server manufacturers. It is a kind of cloud server that can be self obtained at any time and can be flexibly scaled to help users create a reliable, safe, flexible and efficient application environment.

Let's compare the similar elastic ECS products of Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud and Huawei Cloud, three common cloud service providers in China, to see how their similar products perform.

1、 Basic server information

In this evaluation, we compared Alibaba Cloud shared universal MN4 server, Tencent Cloud standard S2 server and Huawei Cloud S6 server. The three types of server test platforms are 4-core 16GB memory, bandwidth is 5Mbps, and the operating system is CentOS 7.2.

In order to ensure the accuracy of the data, we selected servers from Beijing and Shanghai computer rooms of various manufacturers for comparative testing. At the same time, the training machines used in the testing process are all 1-core 1GB memory of the same type as the testing machine, with a bandwidth of 5Mbps and CentOS 7.2 operating system.

2、 Processor and memory performance

First, we run CPU scores on six test servers. Here we use the data of Geekbench 4 run scores. The relevant test programs of Geekbench 4 can be downloaded from the website of Geekbench. After decompression, it can run. Here we run five groups of points for each server to get the average value.

During the test, we saw that Alibaba Cloud MN 4 uses Intel Xeon E5-2682 v4 processor, Tencent Cloud S2 uses Intel Xeon E5-26xx v4 processor, and Huawei Cloud S6 uses Intel Xeon Gold 6278C with SkyLake architecture.

Among the three servers, the specific model of Tencent Cloud is unknown, but according to the score data of Geekbench 4, it should be Xeon E5 269x v4. Because the architecture of Huawei Cloud S6 is relatively new, the single core and multi-core scores of Huawei Cloud S6 are significantly better than those of Tencent Cloud S2 and Alibaba Cloud MN4.

Here, we can see that Huawei Cloud S6 server has many advantages over similar products of other manufacturers in terms of processor performance. This advantage directly affects the computing performance of the server. In a high-performance scenario, Huawei Cloud S6 will perform better than Tencent Cloud S2 and Alibaba Cloud MN4.

In terms of memory, we selected 16GB for testing for each product, but different manufacturers have different memory choices. For cost saving reasons, ECS manufacturers often seldom publish the frequency and model of memory. Here we test the test servers on AliCloud, Tencent Cloud and Huawei Cloud through stream testing tools.

Stream is one of the most popular comprehensive memory bandwidth performance measurement tools in the industry. Stream supports four operations: Copy, Scale, Add, and Triad.

Copy first accesses a memory unit to read the value, and then writes the value to another memory unit. The Scale operation reads the value from the memory unit, performs a multiplication operation, and then writes the result to another memory unit. The Add operation reads two values from a memory cell, performs addition operations, and then writes the results to another memory cell. Triad indicates that Copy, Scale and Add operations are combined for testing.

Before testing, you should decompress and compile the stream file. The specific compiled code is as follows:

 gcc -O3 -fopenmp -DSTREAM_ARRAY_SIZE=64000000 -DNTIMES=10 stream.c -o stream

For the memory test here, we also tested the test server five times to get the average value. The specific test data is as follows:

Here we see that the memory specifications of Huawei Cloud S6 server are better than those of the other two servers, so its stream memory test data is also the best, followed by Tencent Cloud S2 server. The memory specifications of Alibaba Cloud MN4 Beijing and Alibaba Cloud MN4 Shanghai are obviously different, which leads to a large gap in bandwidth performance.

We can see that the memory bandwidth performance of Huawei ECS in Scale, Add and Triad is basically twice that of the other two.

In this way, we can see that Huawei Cloud can cope with large-scale data in terms of memory bandwidth, and can handle a large amount of data processing in combination with the high-performance Intel Xeon Gold 6278C processor.

3、 Storage performance

At this stage, different cloud server vendors will provide different storage solutions to deal with various use scenarios. This storage solution is often called cloud disk service. It provides persistent block storage services for computing services such as ECS and BMS. It provides high availability, persistence, and stable low latency performance through multiple technologies such as data redundancy and cache acceleration. You can format the cloud disk service, create a file system, and store data persistently.

At this stage, manufacturers will basically provide three storage solutions, namely, ordinary cloud disk, high-speed cloud disk, and SSD cloud disk. Here we test the storage capacity of the test machine by attaching different types of cloud disks.

Since the sales of ordinary cloud disks in Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud test zones are out of stock, we only test the high-speed cloud disks and SSD cloud disks of the three cloud service providers tested. The tool used for the test is fio. The test items include random read/write IOPS and sequential read/write throughput. The test disk size is 700GB.

Although different companies have different names, we can also generally understand one of the capabilities of these hard disks. Huawei Cloud names high-speed hard disks as high IO cloud disks, Tencent Cloud names them as high-performance cloud disks, and Alibaba Cloud names them as efficient cloud disks. Here we first look at the performance of each high-speed cloud disk.

In terms of the 4K random read and write performance of high-speed cloud disks, we see that Tencent Cloud performs better. The 4K read and write performance is basically 6000IOPS, while Huawei Cloud maintains 5000IOPS, and Alibaba Cloud maintains 5050IOPS. This random read and write allows faster access to some highly fragmented data. However, there is little difference in the performance of the three high-speed cloud disks, The same is true for sequential read/write throughput. This high-speed cloud disk is more suitable for storing some redundant data and static data.

In terms of naming SSD cloud disks, each company has its own independent naming method. Huawei Cloud calls it the ultra-high IO cloud disk, and Tencent Cloud and Alibaba Cloud call it the SSD cloud disk. SSD cloud disks often have high requirements for particles, which can also ensure ultra-high speed access to some hot data.

In the 4K random read and write test, Huawei Cloud's ultra-high IO cloud disk reached 330000 IOPS, which is really eye-catching compared with the other two. The random reading and writing of Tencent Cloud SSD cloud disk 4K is only about 200000 IOPS, while the random reading and writing of Alibaba Cloud SSD cloud disk 4K is about 230000 IOPS. The random writing performance of Alibaba Cloud Beijing machine room 4K is inferior to that of Shanghai machine room, only 190000 IOPS. In the subsequent sequential read and write tests, Alibaba Cloud also encountered this problem.

In sequential read and write, we can see that Huawei Cloud is still eye-catching, with sequential read and write throughput reaching 350MB/s, while Tencent Cloud SSD cloud disk is stable at 273MB/s. The sequential write throughput of Alibaba Cloud's Beijing machine room is only 199MB/s, while the sequential read throughput is basically the same as that of the Shanghai machine room, around 300MB/s.

From the overall test of high-speed cloud disks and SSD cloud disks, we can see that the overall gap between high-speed cloud disks is not large, but the SSD cloud disk Shanghuawei Cloud has more leading advantages, while the performance of Tencent Cloud SSD cloud disk is relatively low and stable. Although Alibaba Cloud SSD cloud disk performance is higher than Tencent Cloud, there is a gap between the stability of different machine rooms.

4、 Virtual machine intranet test

Generally speaking, cloud service providers allow users to apply for multiple servers in the same machine room to build various services. This service is called virtual private cloud. Users can freely configure IP address segments, subnets, security groups and other sub services between these servers, and can also apply for elastic bandwidth and elastic IP to build business systems.

Here we first use netperf tool to test the TCP bandwidth performance between the three server operators. Here we need to start 4 training machines in each host. The test machine and 4 training machines are installed with netperf. The test machine is the server, and the training machine is the client.

The test port command is as follows:

 Netserver - p port&(ports 7001, 7002, 7003, and 7004 are test ports)

The client password is as follows:

 Netperf - H serverip - p port - t TCP_STREAM - l 300 -- - m 1440&(serverip is the intranet IP of the test machine, and port is the corresponding test interface)

The test results are as follows:

The test results show that Huawei's intranet bandwidth is around 400Mbps, Tencent's intranet bandwidth is around 1100Mbps, and Alibaba Cloud's intranet bandwidth is around 280Mbps. On the whole, Tencent cloud intranet bandwidth is suitable for the intranet composed of multiple servers with large data volume according to its advantages.

Next, we use iPerf3 to conduct UDP PPS test on the test machine. Here, each test machine opens 8 ports as test ports, and each sparring machine pressurizes the test machine through 2 ports. The open ports are 16001-16008.

The test port command is as follows:

 Iperf3 - s - i 1 - p port

The client password is as follows:

 Iperf3 - u - l 16 - b 100m - t 120 - c serverip i 1 - p port

The test results are as follows:

From the test results, we can see that Huawei S6 intranet PPS is 250000, Tencent S2 intranet PPS is between 450000 and 510000, and AliCloud MN4 intranet PPS is 150000. Overall, Tencent's cloud intranet data performance is better, but the performance of the other two companies can basically meet the daily use needs of enterprise users.

5、 Virtual machine external network test

Virtual machine external network test We test the server to be tested through a third-party test website. The connectivity between the external network and virtual machine directly determines the speed and quality of related services in the future. Through five consecutive sets of test data, we obtained the average PING value of each host, as follows:

We can see that the average PING value of each company is about 60ms, and the average overseas PING value is about 130ms, which is relatively close as a whole.

Next, we simply test the transmission speed and link quality of the test server by downloading a 100MB file from the server. Here we test five groups each time. The test network is Qingdao Unicom. The test results are as follows:

Here we can see that among the three cloud service providers, Huawei Cloud S6 server has a fast connection speed, and the overall file download is also better than the other two. Of course, there are network factors in this test, but each network is relatively stable.

summary

In general, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud and Huawei Cloud have similar configurations. On the whole, Huawei Cloud and Tencent Cloud are better than Alibaba Cloud.

If users prefer large-scale computing and high-speed data storage, Huawei Cloud is a better choice. If a large-scale service cluster is to be established, the speed of Tencent Cloud Intranet Unicom is also a very good guarantee. Alibaba Cloud's share of the domestic market has also attracted many users.

As for the price, I don't think it is a problem to consider, because the mainstream cloud service providers mainly promote ordering on schedule or by volume. At the same time, there will be a variety of discounts when the volume is large, and there will be special salespersons for key customers to give reference. Therefore, for webmasters, if they determine the demand and consumption, the cloud server manufacturers will naturally come out clearly.