Latency and Performance in the Mobile Cloud

Smart phones and tablets have become a favorite way to surf the Internet, access emails and purchase products. Usage of these devices comes at a price…slower, more expensive bandwidth, smaller screen real estate, less memory, less computing power and security concerns. To address these issues, many companies have begun to use mobile cloud computing to deliver services to their customers. While cloud computing is not a new technology, it does provide new ways to deliver existing services driven by the demands of mobile technologies. Gartner predicts that mobile cloud computing will reach $9.5B by 2014.

Although cloud computing can alleviate some of the constraints of a mobile device, beware of latency and the differences between clouds. In a report published by Bitcurrent (now CloudOps), the performance of ten cloud providers was analyzed. They include Amazon, Salesforce, Google, and Rackspace. Providers were selected based on the ease of setup and the absence of long-term contracts. The tests were run over a month-long period with a generic mobile site using Neustar web performance services.

Findings indicate that smaller, leaner sites had an advantage. However, there is a limit to how small a site can get before its bandwidth advantage disappears. Fast response time and caching content is more important than bandwidth spending. Also, there is seasonality to the Internet, something to consider when doing capacity planning. Lastly, performance varies from region to region, so it’s important to test at various locations to identify any problems.

You can access the report for more detailed findings.