Next stop, the cloud: understanding modern web service deployment in EC2 and azure

An increasingly large fraction of Internet services are hosted on a cloud computing system such as Amazon EC2 or Windows Azure. But to date, no in-depth studies about cloud usage by Internet services has been performed. We provide a detailed measurement study to shed light on how modern web service deployments use the cloud and to identify ways in which cloud-using services might improve these deployments. Our results show that: 4% of the Alexa top million use EC2/Azure; there exist several common deployment patterns for cloud-using web service front ends; and services can significantly improve their wide-area performance and failure tolerance by making better use of existing regional diversity in EC2. Driving these analyses are several new datasets, including one with over 34 million DNS records for Alexa websites and a packet capture from a large university network.