Exploring the cloud from passive measurements: The Amazon AWS case

This paper presents a characterization of Amazon's Web Services (AWS), the most prominent cloud provider that offers computing, storage, and content delivery platforms. Leveraging passive measurements, we explore the EC2, S3 and CloudFront AWS services to unveil their infrastructure, the pervas...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bermudez, Ignacio, Traverso, Stefano, Mellia, Marco, Munafo, Maurizio
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Availability
IP networks
Measurement
Monitoring
Servers
Time factors
Web services
Online Access:Request full text
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Summary:This paper presents a characterization of Amazon's Web Services (AWS), the most prominent cloud provider that offers computing, storage, and content delivery platforms. Leveraging passive measurements, we explore the EC2, S3 and CloudFront AWS services to unveil their infrastructure, the pervasiveness of content they host, and their traffic allocation policies. Measurements reveal that most of the content residing on EC2 and S3 is served by one Amazon datacenter, located in Virginia, which appears to be the worst performing one for Italian users. This causes traffic to take long and expensive paths in the network. Since no automatic migration and load-balancing policies are offered by AWS among different locations, content is exposed to the risks of outages. The CloudFront CDN, on the contrary, shows much better performance thanks to the effective cache selection policy that serves 98% of the traffic from the nearest available cache. CloudFront exhibits also dynamic load-balancing policies, in contrast to the static allocation of instances on EC2 and S3. Information presented in this paper will be useful for developers aiming at entrusting AWS to deploy their contents, and for researchers willing to improve cloud design.
ISSN:0743-166X
2641-9874
DOI:10.1109/INFCOM.2013.6566769