Benchmarking cloud resources for HEP

In a commercial cloud environment, exhaustive resource profiling is beneficial to cope with the intrinsic variability of the virtualised environment, allowing to promptly identify performance degradation. In the context of its commercial cloud initiatives, CERN has acquired extensive experience in benchmarking commercial cloud resources. Ultimately, this activity provides information on the actual delivered performance of invoiced resources. In this report we discuss the experience acquired and the results collected using several fast benchmark applications adopted by the HEP community. These benchmarks span from open-source benchmarks to specific user applications and synthetic benchmarks. The workflow put in place to collect and analyse performance metrics is also described.