"Cloud computing" is a popular way for application providers to obtain a flexible server and network infrastructure. Providers deploying applications with tight response time requirements such as games, are reluctant to use clouds. An important reason is the lack of real-time guarantees. This paper evaluates the actual, practical soft real-time CPU performance of current cloud services, with a special focus on online games. To perform this evaluation, we created a small benchmark and calibrated it to take a few milliseconds to run (often referred to as a microbenchmrak). Repeating this benchmark at a high frequency gives an overview of available resources over time. From the experimental results, we find that public cloud services deliver performance mostly within the requirements of popular online games, where Microsoft Azure Virtual machines give a significantly more stable performance than Amazon EC2.
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