#newcloudsandboxes

Cloud Sandboxes

Customers are invited to test the performance of 2nd and 4th generation Intel Xeon processors in a nonproduction environment using a new sandbox that uses IBM  Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC.

 Intel Cloud Virtual Servers and IBM Cloud Virtual Servers have launched a new custom cloud sandbox.

What is a cloud sandbox?

A cloud sandbox is a cloud infrastructure security feature that establishes a segregated testing environment. Users can securely launch programmes, run code, and test setups in this environment without affecting the system as a whole.

Resolving issues with performance in a testing setting

To fully comprehend the effectiveness of sophisticated apps running in your cloud hosting environment, performance testing is essential. Indeed, even in fully managed business settings such as IBM Cloud. Your compute strategy ultimately defines how performance is spread among your workloads, even while IBM can provide the newest hardware and software across global data centres built for optimum availability.

 Cloud sandboxes are useful since it’s important to understand your system’s performance characteristics before deploying to production. Without endangering vital resources, you can test and watch how a certain workload behaves in a segregated, non-production environment. Like the one IBM is releasing today, some cloud sandboxes concentrate on monitoring the memory, CPU, network, and I/O utilisation of your server. These kinds of cloud sandboxes can assist in figuring out how much money and processing capacity are needed for both short- and long-term execution. Let’s investigate the specifics.

Intel Xeon processor comparison on virtual servers using the new IBM Cloud sandbox

You may rapidly test and evaluate the workload performance characteristics of 2nd Gen Intel Xeon processors versus 4th Gen  Intel Xeon processors on IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC using the new IBM  Cloud VPC sandbox. You have the option of deploying your own application for a fully customised evaluation or testing IBM system performance differences on preconfigured apps with preselected workload benchmarks. Using IBM Cloud Schematics and Terraform as the programming foundation, the IBM Cloud VPC sandbox is automated and operates on your IBM Cloud VPC account.

The virtual server resources you test are invoiced hourly and will belong to you. Therefore, after your testing is finished, it’s crucial to remove your virtual servers and application environment, just like in the majority of customer-managed cloud sandboxes. Benchmark tests can take as little as 30 seconds to a maximum of about 15 minutes, depending on your application environment. To enrol in their reimbursement programme and receive 100% of your expenses back in IBM Cloud credits, get in touch with IBM sandbox team.

Build, test, and destroy: options for IBM Cloud VPC sandbox applications

Huggingface, Presto, or a Monte Carlo simulation can be used as benchmarks while testing in the new IBM  Cloud VPC sandbox. Alternatively, you might bring your own (BYO) customised app.

Monte Carlo simulation: For financial workloads, the Monte Carlo simulation has emerged as the industry standard for analysing the statical patterns of huge, random data sets. The fundamental modelling strategy of the simulation is based on chance, just like in the casino game roulette. Applied within the IBM Cloud VPC sandbox on two distinct virtual servers, the default load settings generate numerical performance results through repeated random sampling. You may view the number of operations per second, memory usage, and CPU usage for every benchmark that is run on your virtual servers running both 2nd and 4th generation  Intel Xeon processors.

HuggingFace inference application: The IBM  Cloud VPC sandbox’s HuggingFace benchmark programme (version Optimum Intel with Pytorch) lets you run and test many natural language processing models on two widely used text categorization tasks: Bert-base-uncased and Roberta-base. This application is used for inference purposes. The performance dashboard will provide the model inference time for 100 iterations in milliseconds when you run the tests against your 2nd and 4th generation Intel Xeon-based virtual servers, allowing you to readily monitor the performance trend over time.

Presto data lake application: TPC-H query execution on Presto is crucial for decision support tasks in large-scale data lake systems and analytics. Second and fourth generation  Intel Xeon-based virtual servers are tested using IBM PrestoDB and TPC-H, the industry standard for data warehousing benchmarks, inside the IBM  Cloud VPC sandbox. Additionally, each test calculates query times in milliseconds.

Bring your own device (BYOD): Would you like to test the vCPU performance of our newest Intel Xeon processors with your own application? Not an issue. Using shell script formatting, you may quickly and simply upload your installer and runner file via the IBM Cloud VPC sandbox dashboard interface. Alternatively, you can configure IBM Cloud LogDNA for your application. For all performance benchmarks, Ubuntu 22.04 is used in each option. Once implemented, you can evaluate your 2nd and 4th generation  Intel Xeon-based virtual servers’ average, current, and maximum utilisation metrics.