typhoon/docs/topics/performance.md

Performance

Provision Time

Provisioning times vary based on the operating system and platform. Sampling the time to create (apply) and destroy clusters with 1 controller and 2 workers shows (roughly) what to expect.

Platform	Apply	Destroy
AWS	5 min	3 min
Azure	10 min	7 min
Bare-Metal	10-15 min	NA
Digital Ocean	3 min 30 sec	20 sec
Google Cloud	8 min	5 min

Notes:

• SOA TTL and NXDOMAIN caching can have a large impact on provision time
• Platforms with auto-scaling take more time to provision (AWS, Azure, Google)
• Bare-metal POST times and network bandwidth will affect provision times

Network Performance

Network performance varies based on the platform and CNI plugin. iperf was used to measure the bandwidth between different hosts and different pods. Host-to-host shows typical bandwidth between host machines. Pod-to-pod shows the bandwidth between two iperf containers.

Platform / Plugin	Theory	Host to Host	Pod to Pod
AWS (flannel)	5 Gb/s	4.94 Gb/s	4.89 Gb/s
AWS (calico, MTU 1480)	5 Gb/s	4.94 Gb/s	4.42 Gb/s
AWS (calico, MTU 8981)	5 Gb/s	4.94 Gb/s	4.90 Gb/s
Azure (flannel)	Varies	749 Mb/s	650 Mb/s
Azure (calico)	Varies	749 Mb/s	650 Mb/s
Bare-Metal (flannel)	1 Gb/s	940 Mb/s	903 Mb/s
Bare-Metal (calico)	1 Gb/s	940 Mb/s	931 Mb/s
Digital Ocean (flannel)	Varies	1.97 Gb/s	1.20 Gb/s
Digital Ocean (calico)	Varies	1.97 Gb/s	1.20 Gb/s
Google Cloud (flannel)	2 Gb/s	1.94 Gb/s	1.76 Gb/s
Google Cloud (calico)	2 Gb/s	1.94 Gb/s	1.81 Gb/s

Notes:

• Calico, Cilium, and Flannel have comparable performance. Platform and configuration differences dominate.
• Azure and DigitalOcean network performance can be quite variable or depend on machine type
• Only certain AWS EC2 instance types allow jumbo frames. This is why the default MTU on AWS must be 1480.