Yes! As a hobby, I've been running long-term benchmarks on a handful of cloud services, for exactly the reason you suggest -- performance varies quite a bit ov

Yes! As a hobby, I've been running long-term benchmarks on a handful of cloud services, for exactly the reason you suggest -- performance varies quite a bit over time. You can browse through some of the data at (http://amistrongeryet.com/dashboard.jsp http://amistrongeryet.com/dashboard.jsp). The UI on this site is abysmal, and it only shows 30 days of data (I've actually collected almost two years), but it still gives some flavor of how much variability there is. For instance, check out this graph of SimpleDB reads: (http://amistrongeryet.com/op_detail.jsp?op=simpledb_readInconsistent http://amistrongeryet.com/op_detail.jsp?op=simpledb_readInco...). I've blogged on the data from time to time; for instance, (http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2010/04/three-latency-anomalies.html http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2010/04/three-latency-ano...). If there's interest, I'll work on making this data more accessible, adding documentation, and providing access to the full two years. In any case it's limited by the fact that I'm only probing AWS and Google App Engine, and only one or two instances of each. What I'd really like to do is open this up to crowdsourcing -- as I discussed a while back at (http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2011/07/cloudsat.html http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2011/07/cloudsat.html). If anyone is interested in participating in a project like this, let me know!