Network performance benchmarks for AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda.

Results (Fargate)

Here are some results from benchmarks performed on eu-west-1 and eu-north-1 regions on 2024-06-15. See analysis/2024/results.ipynb for more detailed graphs.

eu-west-1

vCPU	Memory (MB)	Baseline (Gbps)	Burst (Gbps)	Burst Duration (seconds)
0.25	512	0.063	4.214	410
0.25	1024	0.127	4.525	560
0.25	2048	0.254	4.688	710
0.50	1024	0.127	4.571	630
0.50	2048	0.254	4.705	780
0.50	4096	0.508	4.888	1000
1.00	2048	0.254	4.577	730
1.00	4096	0.508	4.895	1120
1.00	8192	0.744	9.719	300
2.00	4096	0.744	9.720	340
2.00	8192	0.744	9.556	310
2.00	16384	1.241	9.827	710
4.00	8192	1.241	9.829	640
4.00	16384	1.241	9.869	750
4.00	30720	1.241	9.735	550

Observations:

• Baseline performance seems to change based on allocated memory
  • With 1024 MB you get ~125 Mbps
  • With 2048 MB you get ~250 Mbps
  • With 4096 MB you get ~500 Mbps (1 vCPU or less) or ~750 Mbps (2 vCPUs)
  • With 8192 MB you get ~750 Mbps (2 vCPU or less) or ~1250 Mbps (4 vCPUs)
  • With 16 GB or 32 GB you get ~1250 Mbps
• Burst performance is either around 5 Gbps (smaller tasks) or 10 Gbps (larger tasks)
• Burst duration is longer for larger tasks (but not always)
• Performance is very similar to that in eu-north-1

eu-north-1

vCPU	Memory (MB)	Baseline (Gbps)	Burst (Gbps)	Burst Duration (seconds)
0.25	512	0.063	4.185	410
0.25	1024	0.127	4.547	570
0.25	2048	0.254	4.683	920
0.50	1024	0.127	4.584	540
0.50	2048	0.254	4.738	820
0.50	4096	0.508	4.819	900
1.00	2048	0.254	4.706	920
1.00	4096	0.508	4.782	1080
1.00	8192	0.744	9.720	310
2.00	4096	0.775	11.802	260
2.00	8192	0.744	9.720	350
2.00	16384	1.241	9.729	660
4.00	8192	1.241	9.828	710
4.00	16384	1.241	9.827	700
4.00	30720	1.241	9.747	710

Observations:

• Baseline performance seems to change based on allocated memory
  • With 1024 MB you get ~125 Mbps
  • With 2048 MB you get ~250 Mbps
  • With 4096 MB you get ~500 Mbps (1 vCPU or less) or ~750 Mbps (2 vCPUs)
  • With 8192 MB you get ~750 Mbps (2 vCPU or less) or ~1250 Mbps (4 vCPUs)
  • With 16 GB or 32 GB you get ~1250 Mbps
• Burst performance is either around 5 Gbps (smaller tasks) or 10 Gbps (larger tasks)
• Burst duration is longer for larger tasks
• Performance is very similar to that in eu-west-1

Results (Lambda)

Here are some results from benchmarks performed on eu-west-1 and eu-north-1 regions on 2024-06-15. See analysis/2024/results-lambda.ipynb for more detailed graphs.

eu-west-1

Memory (MB)	Baseline (Gbps)	Burst (Gbps)	Burst Duration (seconds)
128	0.597	2.109	0
256	0.618	2.691	0
512	0.611	2.735	0
1024	0.611	2.740	0
1792	0.611	2.738	0
2048	0.609	2.752	0
3008	0.600	2.750	0

eu-north-1

Memory (MB)	Baseline (Gbps)	Burst (Gbps)	Burst Duration (seconds)
128	0.596	2.043	0
256	0.614	2.675	0
512	0.612	2.742	0
1024	0.609	2.739	0
1792	0.604	2.740	0
2048	0.607	2.732	0
3008	0.568	2.749	0

Observations

• Lambda functions have a stable 600 Mbps network throughput with a small burst to 2.7 Gbps in the beginning
• Burst throughput has increased from 1.7 Gbps (2020) to 2.7 Gbps (2024)
• No differences between regions

Running Benchmarks (Fargate)

Prerequisites

You must have the following setup to be able to run these benchmarks:

• AWS credentials with admin level privileges
• AWS account with VPC and Subnets from sjakthol/aws-account-infra.
• Docker

Once setup, you can deploy the benchmark infra (ECR, ECS, Roles, Security Groups, Log Groups) by running

make deploy-infra

in this directory. Once the ECR registry has been created, you'll need to build the Docker image used for benchmarks:

make build tag push

Execute Benchmarks

Use one of the benchmark targets from the Makefile to execute benchmarks:

make benchmark-fargate-512-1024 # benchmark of Fargate container with 0.5vCPU and 1GB memory

The targets will create a Fargate task of specified size, execute the benchmark and delete the resources used in the benchmark.

Running Benchmarks (Lambda)

Prerequisites

You must have the following setup to be able to run these benchmarks:

• AWS credentials with admin level privileges
• AWS account with VPC and Subnets from sjakthol/aws-account-infra.
• Docker

Once setup, you can deploy the benchmark infra (ECR, ECS, Roles, Security Groups, Log Groups) by running

make deploy-infra

in this directory. Once done, you'll need to prepare the Lambda function by running

(cd lambda && make lib)

Finally, you'll need to deploy the iperf3 server run running

make deploy-lambda-server

Execute Benchmarks

Use one of the benchmark targets from the Makefile to execute benchmarks:

make benchmark-lambda-512 # benchmark of Lambda function 512 MB of memory
make benchmark-lambda_all # benchmark different configs one by one

The targets will create a Lambda function of specified size, execute the benchmark and delete the resources used in the benchmark.

Clean up

Delete the iperf3 server by running

make delete-lambda-server

How it Works?

This project uses iperf3 to measure network performance.

For Fargate, we package an iperf3 server into a Docker container, deploy the container as a Fargate task and create an EC2 instance to execute iperf3 client against the iperf3 server in Fargate. Benchmarks configure iperf3 client to use 10 connections to execute a 15 minute benchmark in reverse mode (server sends the data to the client, not the other way around).

For Lambda, we package an iperf3 client into a Lambda function, deploy an iperf3 server into EC2 and execute iperf3 client in Lambda against an iperf3 server in EC2. Benchmarks configure iperf3 client to use 1 connection to execute a 60 minute benchmark (client sends data to server).

Benchmark results are saved to Amazon S3 as JSON with the output from iperf3 as well as some custom metadata from the execution.

Credits

• https://github.com/widdix/ec2-network-benchmark

License

MIT