Tiered Cloud Routing: Methodology, Latency, and Improvement

Large cloud providers including AWS, Azure, and Google offer two tiers of network services to their customers: WAN-transit service and inet-transit service. Little is known about how each cloud provider offers different transit services, how well these services work, and whether the quality of those services can be further improved. In this work, we conduct a large-scale study to answer these questions. Using RIPE Atlas probes as vantage points, we explore how traffic enters and leaves the WAN of each of the three clouds. In addition, we measure the access latencies of these two network services of each cloud and compare them with emulated alternative routing strategies.