Performance analysis of Constellation
This section provides a comprehensive examination of the performance characteristics of Constellation, encompassing various aspects, including runtime encryption, I/O benchmarks, and real-world applications.
Impact of runtime encryption on performance
All nodes in a Constellation cluster are executed inside Confidential VMs (CVMs). Consequently, the performance of Constellation is inherently linked to the performance of these CVMs.
AMD and Azure benchmarking
AMD and Azure have collectively released a performance benchmark for CVMs that utilize 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors (Milan) with SEV-SNP. This benchmark, which included a variety of mostly compute-intensive tests such as SPEC CPU 2017 and CoreMark, demonstrated that CVMs experience only minor performance degradation (ranging from 2% to 8%) when compared to standard VMs. Such results are indicative of the performance that can be expected from compute-intensive workloads running with Constellation on Azure.
AMD and Google benchmarking
Similarly, AMD and Google have jointly released a performance benchmark for CVMs employing 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors (Milan) with SEV-SNP. With high-performance computing workloads such as WRF, NAMD, Ansys CFS, and Ansys LS_DYNA, they observed analogous findings, with only minor performance degradation (between 2% and 4%) compared to standard VMs. These outcomes are reflective of the performance that can be expected for compute-intensive workloads running with Constellation on GCP.
I/O performance benchmarks
We evaluated the I/O performance of Constellation, utilizing a collection of synthetic benchmarks targeting networking and storage. We further compared this performance to native managed Kubernetes offerings from various cloud providers, to better understand how Constellation stands in relation to standard practices.
Application benchmarking
To gauge Constellation's applicability to well-known applications, we performed a benchmark of HashiCorp Vault running on Constellation. The results were then compared to deployments on the managed Kubernetes offerings from different cloud providers, providing a tangible perspective on Constellation's performance in actual deployment scenarios.