According to TechTarget, “Amazon Web Services shops said they’ve seen fluctuating performance on the company’s Elastic Compute Cloud due to ‘noisy neighbors,’ but Amazon officials said that’s a misconception.”

Everyone seems to blame any kind of performance issue on “noisy neighbors.”  Usually it’s other technical issues that come into play.  These problems typically include local bandwidth issues, or perhaps poorly written applications.  In some cases, other tenants hogging cloud resources may indeed be the case, but I’ve found that the blame should go elsewhere in most situations.

AWS seems to agree.  “What customers are really reporting [is that] there is a difference in performance from one instance to another, but it’s not due to other people [sharing the hardware],” said Matt Wood, of AWS.  However, the way that AWS deploys machine instances and manages tenants are not actual things that AWS users can see outside of the provided APIs and interfaces.

The issues around “noisy neighbors” will be something that AWS has to deal with, no matter if that’s the case or not.  Better visibility into performance heuristics and ongoing management may go a long way to remove this issue from the minds of AWS users.  No matter if it’s warranted or not.