Paper Info
Title
Exploring the cloud from passive measurements: The Amazon AWS case
Abstract
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/INFCOM.2013.6566769
INFOCOM
Keywords
Field
DocType
Web services,cache storage,cloud computing,Amazon AWS case,CloudFront AWS services,CloudFront CDN,EC2,S3,Web services,automatic migration,cache selection policy,cloud-based services,load-balancing policy,passive measurement,static allocation,traffic allocation policy
Content delivery,Computer security,Cache,Computer science,Computer network,Cloud provider,Amazon rainforest,Web service,Cloud computing
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
0743-166X
978-1-4673-5944-3
19
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.03
11
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ignacio Bermudez1403.88
Stefano Traverso224118.97
Marco Mellia32748204.65
Maurizio M. Munafò446429.47