Trying Out & Benchmarking The DigitalOcean Cloud

While Amazon EC2 relies upon Xen virtualization for their cloud, DigitalOcean uses Linux KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine). When setting up a new instance you also have the choice of enabling VirtIO for better disk performance, private networking support, or enabling backups (at a cost premium).

The time from creating a DigitalOcean account to making my first droplet was just a few minutes. The setup and management process at DigitalOcean was extremely easy.

DigitalOcean even offers a web-based console for those not SSH'ing into the droplet or just needing quick access to the system.

While this is my first time benchmarking the DigitalOcean cloud, many others have already done so using our open-source Phoronix Test Suite software, including dozens or perhaps even hundreds who have already shared their DigitalOcean results on OpenBenchmarking.org. By using the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org it's turnkey to run automated and fully-reproducible benchmarks from start to finish; from the automatic downloading and setting up of tests to execution, results analysis, and shorting.

For this first article I am running benchmarks of all the standard CloudOcean instance types: 512MB / 1 CPU / 20GB SSD / 1TB Transfer, 1GB / 1 CPU / 30GB SSD / 2TB Transfer, 2GB / 2 CPUs / 40GB SSD / 3TB Transfer, 4GB / 2 CPUs / 60GB SSD / 4TB Transfer, 8GB / 4 CPUs / 80GB SSD / 5TB Transfer, and 16GB / 8 CPUs / 160GB SSD / 6TB Transfer. All of these instances were out of DigitalOcean's "New York 2" location and were running Ubuntu 13.10 x64. No other changes were made to the operating system configuration aside from installing the Phoronix Test Suite dependencies (php5-cli and php5-json) and then the Phoronix Test Suite automatically installed each test's own necessary dependencies.

Though these are just standalone results of several DigitalOcean instances, you can easily run your own benchmarks that directly compare the performance of your own private cloud, other cloud instance, desktop, or even heck your own mobile device. With the Phoronix Test Suite installed it's just a matter of running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1403243-PL-DIGITALOC44. It should be that easy! If you have any problems, let us know.

From the system table we see that DigitalOcean doesn't use all of the same hardware (given the CPU clock speed differences although the actual CPU models are concealed by the KVM-QEMU identifier) between droplet types, but again they don't appear to be publicly exposing the hardware they are using for each droplet type.

Going forward in the weeks ahead I intend to do some comparative cloud benchmarks directly between instances at the popular cloud providers, benchmarks of different Linux distributions in the DigitalOcean cloud, and other cloud benchmarks. You can see some other past Phoronix.com cloud benchmark articles with benchmarking Amazon EC2's new C3 instance type, a 5-way Amazon EC2 Cloud Linux OS comparison, and benchmarking EC2 against bare metal systems, among other articles.

With all of that said, here's some benchmarks from the DigitalOcean cloud of different instances running Ubuntu 13.10 x86_64 with the Linux 3.11 kernel.