CLAudit: Planetary-scale cloud latency auditing platform

Abstract

Latency is an important, yet often underestimated aspect of the nascent Cloud-Computing scenario. A cloud service based on processing in remote datacenters may exhibit latency and jitter which may be a compound result of many various components of the remote computation and intermediate communication. Our broad vision is to design and develop tools to monitor, model and optimize the global cloud-service latency. To this end, we introduce CLAudit, a prototype planetary-scale cloud-latency auditing platform. It utilizes the experimental PlanetLab network to place globally distributed probes that periodically measure cloud-service latency at various layers of the communication stack. We present CLAudit architecture in detail and show initial test-measurements of the MicrosoftWindows Azure cloud service, demonstrating the platform's practical usefulness by showcasing a few discovered anomalous results in the cloud-service latency measurements.