Head into the Cloud: An Analysis of the Emerging Cloud Infrastructure

Abstract

We are witnessing a paradigm shift in computing---people are increasingly using Web-based software for tasks that only a few years ago were carried out using software running locally on their computers. The increasing use of mobile devices, which typically have limited processing power, is catalyzing the idea of offloading computations to the cloud. It is within this context of cloud computing that this thesis attempts to address a few key questions: (a) With more computations moving to the cloud, what is the state of the Internet's core? In particular, do routing changes and consistent congestion in the Internet's core affect end users' experiences? (b) With software-defined networking (SDN) principles increasingly being used to manage cloud infrastructures, are the software solutions robust (i.e., resilient to bugs)? With service outage costs being prohibitively expensive, how can we support network operators in experimenting with novel ideas without crashing their SDN ecosystems? (c) How can we build a large-scale passive IP geolocation system to geolocate the entire IP address space at once so that cloud-based software can utilize the geolocation database in enhancing the end-user experience? (d) Why is the Internet so slow? Since a low-latency network allows more offloading of computations to the cloud, how can we reduce the latency in the Internet?