CloudSurf: A platform for monitoring public-cloud networks

Despite customers increasingly depend on cloud systems, that are not advertised with any information about either the design or the performance figures of the network infrastructures that support them. In this paper, we introduce CloudSurf, an open-source platform we have designed, implemented, and recently publicly released [5]. CloudSurf allows to monitor public-cloud networking infrastructures from the customer viewpoint throughnon-cooperative approaches, i.e. without relying on information restricted to the cloud provider or to entities playing a privileged role with respect to the provision of cloud services. After having identified a set of desirable features, we discuss the design of the platform, also showing its effectiveness through a set of use cases. Thanks to CloudSurf it is possible to go beyond the coarse information about public-cloud network performance today available. The information collected by CloudSurf can guide customers in performing cloud-services configuration, thus allowing them to improve cloud-network performance, to understand its variability, and to reduce costs.