On the Network Performance of Amazon S3 Cloud-Storage Service

The advances in networking technologies and the increase in the need for storage resources have prompted many companies to outsource their storage needs. Cloud-storage providers offer clean and simple file-system interfaces, abstracting away the complexities of direct hardware management. At the same time, however, such services eliminate the direct oversight of performance that final users with high service-level requirements traditionally expect. While several works in literature have addressed security-related issues (such as privacy, integrity, availability, etc.) few of them have targeted the network performance of this kind of services. In this work we propose the analysis of the performance of the network associated to the storage service offered by Amazon: S3. Thanks to a large-scale distributed campaign performed by leveraging the Bismark measurement platform, we have characterized how the performance of the network may impact the quality of service experienced by final users on the basis of their location and the configuration of services. We found how performance heavily changes (up to 1553 KiB/s) according to the location of the customers and the cloud region they rely on (up to 2117 KiB/s), also deriving a number of usage guidelines for the customers. In addition we characterize the impact of leveraging the Amazon CDN service to distribute contents, finding that while it guarantees up to a 275-percent performance improvement, cases exist for which additional costs may lead to worse performance.