S3 Meets R3 (Reliability, Robustness, and Resilience)

Test Runs

Multiple file operations are available to a user of an Amazon S3 service. In our tests, we focused on two key file operations that dominate a user’s access pattern. The two key operations of interest to us are read (PUT) and write (GET). Realizing that users can store or retrieve files of varying sizes, we broke the latency test into four test cases:

             Test Case I.      Store (PUT) files ranging from 10-to-100 KB.

          Test Case II.      Store (PUT) files ranging from 1-to-10 MB.

       Test Case III.      Retrieve (GET) files ranging from 10-to-100 KB.

        Test Case IV.      Retrieve (GET) files ranging from 1-to-10 MB.

To test the latency of Amazon S3 Web Services, we relied on SOAPSonar Enterprise Edition, a Web Services client tool produced by our company, Crosscheck Networks. SOAPSonar performs functional and load testing as well as vulnerability assessment to ensure that Web Services are reliable and robust before they are deployed. To measure the latency of Amazon S3 Web Services, we used SOAPSonar Enterprise Edition for a full cycle of testing, which included tasks such as generating SOAP traffic and measuring performance metrics.

Figure 1 illustrates the setup used to test Amazon S3 Web Service. In all of our tests, files were written to Amazon S3 using SOAP with attachments based primarily on the MIME standard. We also ran tests using the DIME standard as a comparison and encountered different characteristics than the MIME standard.

The following components & steps are required to run the performance metrics:

1. Download and Install SOAPSonar Enterprise Edition as the S3 Client.
2. Register with Amazon S3 to obtain the AWS Key and the Secret Key.
3. Load the Amazon WSDL and Schema from the Amazon S3 in SOAPSonar.