The Audit4Cloud Platform for Auditing the Networking Performance of Public Clouds

Elastic resource outsourcing is a growing trend that simplifies and makes more efficient the management of resources, by embracing all the features of the execution of services over public clouds, such as high availability and automated scalability management of resources. Therefore, modern enterprise services are increasingly leveraging inter/intra-cloud deployments and the choice of the right cloud provider to support the execution of them becomes a fundamental operational choice. The paper presents our Audit4Cloud platform, an open-source tool for auditing the performance of virtual resources made available by various commercial cloud providers, with specific focus on cloud networking. In particular, we claim that Audit4Cloud is an enabling key in choosing the right cloud vendor as it not only offers the visibility of current values of some significant performance indicators about the offered cloud resources, but also provides users with a complete picture of those performance indicators over time. We have already performed a large experimental campaign by considering primary commercial cloud providers; the collected results show the feasibility of the approach and that Audit4Cloud can play the role of a solid third-party auditing tool to estimate real performance and costs of cloud resources.