Characterizing the Availability and Latency in AWS Network From the Perspective of Tenants

Scalability and performance requirements are driving tenants to increasingly move their applications to public clouds. Unfortunately, cloud providers do not provide a view of their networking infrastructure to the tenants, rather only provide some generic service level agreements (SLAs). Tenants are, therefore, forced to plan the deployments of their applications based on these SLAs. This limits the performance that the tenants can achieve. Keeping this in view, we present a detailed network measurement study of the largest public cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS). We collected network data to characterize the availability and latency of AWS over a period of 100 days and studied various temporal trends across several geographical locations of AWS throughout the world. We performed our study at all three levels of cloud hierarchy: inside availability zones (AZs), across AZs, and across regions. Our results show that network behavior varies significantly over time at different geographical locations, levels of hierarchy, and temporal granularities. For example, while we observed high availability at monthly granularity, it deteriorates at daily and hourly granularities. This and many other such observations that we present have significant implications for cloud tenants. We further implemented our measurement approach on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to demonstrate that it can be deployed on any cloud platform and present some preliminary comparative observations from this implementation. Based on our observations, we present several recommendations that tenants can use to better deploy their applications.