Global Cloud Reachability Measurements

Cloud computing has seen continuous growth over the last decade. The recent rise in popularity of next-generation applications brings forth the question: “Can current cloud infrastructure support the low latency requirements of such apps?” Specifically, the interplay of wireless last-mile and investments of cloud operators in setting up direct peering agreements with ISPs globally to current cloud reachability and latency has remained largely unexplored. This paper investigates the state of end-user to cloud connectivity over wireless media through extensive measurements over six months. We leverage 115,000 wireless probes on the Speedchecker platform and 195 cloud regions from 9 well-established cloud providers. We evaluate the suitability of current cloud infrastructure to meet the needs of emerging applications and highlight various hindering pressure points. We also compare our results to a previous study over RIPE Atlas. Our key findings are: (i) the most impact on latency comes from the geographical distance to the datacenter; (ii) the choice of a measurement platform can significantly influence the results; (iii) wireless last-mile access contributes significantly to the overall latency, almost surpassing the impact of the geographical distance in many cases. We also observe that cloud providers with their own private network backbone and direct peering agreements with serving ISPs offer noticeable improvements in latency, especially in its consistency over longer distances.

In the early days of cloud computing, datacenters were sparsely deployed at distant locations far from end-users with high end-to-end communication latency. However, today's cloud datacenters have become more geographically spread, the bandwidth of the networks keeps increasing, pushing the end-users latency down. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive cloud reachability study as we perform extensive global client-to-cloud latency measurements towards 189 datacenters from all major cloud providers. We leverage the well-known measurement platform RIPE Atlas, involving up to 8500 probes deployed in heterogeneous environments, e.g., home and offices. Our goal is to evaluate the suitability of modern cloud environments for various current and predicted applications. We achieve this by comparing our latency measurements against known human perception thresholds and are able to draw inferences on the suitability of current clouds for novel applications, such as augmented reality. Our results indicate that the current cloud coverage can easily support several latency-critical applications, like cloud gaming, for the majority of the world’s population.

Edge computing aims to enable applications with stringent latency requirements, e.g., augmented reality, and tame the overwhelming data streams generated by IoT devices. A core of this paradigm is to bring the computation from a distant cloud closer to service consumers and data producers. Consequentially, the issue of edge computing facilities' placement arises. We present a comprehensive analysis suggesting where to place general-purpose edge computing resources on an Internet-wide scale. We base our conclusions on extensive real-world network measurements. We perform extensive traceroute measurements from RIPE Atlas to datacenters in the US, resulting in a graph of 11K routers. We identify the affiliations of the routers to determine the network providers that can act as edge providers. We devise several edge placement strategies and show that they can improve cloud access latency by up to 30%.

Edge computing has gained attention from both academia and industry by pursuing two significant challenges: 1) moving latency critical services closer to the users, 2) saving network bandwidth by aggregating large flows before sending them to the cloud. While the rationale appeared sound at its inception almost a decade ago, several current trends are impacting it. Clouds have spread geographically reducing end-user latency, mobile phones? computing capabilities are improving, and network bandwidth at the core keeps increasing. In this paper, we scrutinize edge computing, examining its outlook and future in the context of these trends. We perform extensive client-to-cloud measurements using RIPE Atlas, and show that latency reduction as motivation for edge is not as persuasive as once believed; for most applications the cloud is already 'close enough' for majority of the world's population. This implies that edge computing may only be applicable for certain application niches, as opposed to a general-purpose solution.