The Need for End-to-End Evaluation of Cloud Availability

Hu, Zi and Zhu, Liang and Ardi, Calvin and Katz-Bassett, Ethan and Madhyastha, Harsha V. and Heidemann, John and Yu, Minlan

citation

Zi Hu, Liang Zhu, Calvin Ardi, Ethan Katz-Bassett, Harsha V. Madhyastha, John Heidemann and Minlan Yu 2014. The Need for End-to-End Evaluation of Cloud Availability. Proceedings of the Passive and Active Measurement Workshop (Marina del Rey, California, USA, Mar. 2014), 119–130. [DOI] [PDF]

abstract

People’s computing lives are moving into the cloud, making understanding cloud availability increasingly critical. Prior studies of Internet outages have used ICMP-based pings and traceroutes. While these studies can detect network availability, we show that they can be inaccurate at estimating cloud availability. Without care, ICMP probes can underestimate availability because ICMP is not as robust as application-level measurements such as HTTP. They can overestimate availability if they measure reachability of the cloud’s edge, missing failures in the cloud’s back-end. We develop methodologies sensitive to five “nines” of reliability, and then we compare ICMP and end-to-end measurements for both cloud VM and storage services. We show case studies where one fails and the other succeeds, and our results highlight the importance of application-level retries to reach high precision. When possible, we recommend end-to-end measurement with application-level protocols to evaluate the availability of cloud services.

reference

@inproceedings{Hu14b,
  author = {Hu, Zi and Zhu, Liang and Ardi, Calvin and Katz-Bassett, Ethan and Madhyastha, Harsha V. and Heidemann, John and Yu, Minlan},
  title = {The Need for End-to-End Evaluation of Cloud Availability},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the  Passive and Active Measurement Workshop},
  year = {2014},
  sortdate = {2014-03-01},
  project = {ant, retrofuture, lacrend},
  jsubject = {routing},
  pages = {119--130},
  month = mar,
  address = {Marina del Rey, California, USA},
  publisher = {Springer},
  copyrightholder = {Springer},
  copyrightterms = {
  An author may self-archive an author-created version of his/her
  article on his/her own website and or in his/her institutional
  repository. He/she may also deposit this version on his/her funder's
  or funder's designated repository at the funder's request or as a
  result of a legal obligation, provided it is not made publicly
  available until 12 months after official publication. He/she may not
  use the publisher's PDF version, which is posted on
  \url{www.springerlink.com}, for the purpose of self-archiving or
  deposit. Furthermore, the author may only post his/her version
  provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of
  publication and a link is inserted to the published article on
  Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following
  text: ``The final publication is available at www.springerlink.com''.
  },
  jlocation = {johnh: pafile},
  keywords = {cloud, reliability, outages, ping, TCP, end-to-end},
  doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-04918-2_12},
  url = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Hu14b.html},
  pdfurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Hu14b.pdf},
  otherurl = {http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-04918-2_12},
  blogurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/blog/?p=455}
}

copyright

An author may self-archive an author-created version of his/her article on his/her own website and or in his/her institutional repository. He/she may also deposit this version on his/her funder’s or funder’s designated repository at the funder’s request or as a result of a legal obligation, provided it is not made publicly available until 12 months after official publication. He/she may not use the publisher’s PDF version, which is posted on \urlwww.springerlink.com, for the purpose of self-archiving or deposit. Furthermore, the author may only post his/her version provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer’s website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: “The final publication is available at www.springerlink.com”.