What is "throughput" in a cloud environment?

Throughput in a cloud environment refers to the amount of data that can be processed or transmitted within a specific time frame. It is a crucial metric for evaluating the performance of cloud services, as it indicates how efficiently the infrastructure can handle data loads and serve user requests. High throughput can improve application performance, particularly for operations that require the transfer or processing of large volumes of data, such as data analytics, video streaming, and big data processing.

In cloud computing, understanding throughput helps clients make informed decisions about resource allocation, optimizing bandwidth, and ensuring that service levels meet business needs. This emphasis on processing capacity means that options involving access rates, storage totals, or transfer speeds represent different concepts that do not capture the essence of what throughput specifically measures.