Communication-Aware Cross-Cloud Benchmarking of a Java TCP/MySQL Application Using Client–Server Pairing and Composite Scoring

Application-level evidence is needed to evaluate communication-related delay, processing, reliability, and hosting cost when selecting cloud virtual machines for geographically distributed database-backed applications. This study presents a communication-aware Java TCP/MySQL benchmarking and decision-support framework in which the Java server and MySQL database are co-located on each server VM. The original sequential request campaign compared AWS t2.medium, Azure Standard_D2s_v3, and GCP e2-medium across three client-hosting providers and three client locations: Tokyo, London, and São Paulo (129,600 completed requests). The evaluated metrics included total response time (TRT), server/database processing, a derived application-layer communication-related residual, and request completion, alongside three Communication-aware Cloud Hosting Score (CCHS) scenarios. Under the tested conditions, Azure recorded the lowest overall mean TRT (404.67 ms), while AWS achieved the highest mean CCHS under the balanced (S2) and cost-aware (S3) scenarios. A separate supplementary campaign evaluated three independently provisioned server VMs per provider, AWS-hosted clients, and concurrency levels of 1, 10, and 30 (121,500 successful requests). The mean TRT values were 226.13 ms for AWS, 236.68 ms for Azure, and 228.19 ms for GCP. Because deployment configurations and workloads differed, the campaigns were analyzed separately. The results characterize the selected deployments rather than establishing provider-wide rankings or directly measuring network-path latency.