Clearing Clouds from the Horizon: Latency Characterization of Public Cloud Service Platforms

Services rely more and more on cloud platforms to offer their products to end users. This implies that being able to estimate the latency required to reach those cloud platforms is of growing importance. To shed light on this crucial aspect, we perform a three-month measurement campaign involving traceroute measurements every 30 minutes over 256 pairs of source-destination probes, where the vantage points are located in different Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and the destination probes belong to one of the main Infrastructure Operators (IOs) of Spain. We provide interesting insights obtained from analyzing the data resulting from this campaign. Among them, we observe that, as expected, distance is the unavoidable factor impacting cloud latency. Yet, other results are less anticipated, such as the great stability of the network, or the lack of performance difference when comparing standard and premium network service tiers. We also analyze the potential of forecasting the cloud latency both for future samples but also for unobserved connections.