Inferring Cloud Interconnections: Validation, Geolocation, and Routing Behavior

Public clouds fundamentally changed the Internet landscape, centralizing traffic generation in a handful of networks. Internet performance, robustness, and public policy analyses struggle to properly reflect this centralization, largely because public collections of BGP and traceroute reveal a small portion of cloud connectivity.This paper evaluates and improves our ability to infer cloud connectivity, bootstrapping future measurements and analyses that more accurately reflect the cloud-centric Internet. We also provide a technique for identifying the interconnections that clouds use to reach destinations around the world, allowing edge networks and enterprises to understand how clouds reach them via their public WAN. Finally, we present two techniques for geolocating the interconnections between cloud networks at the city level that can inform assessments of their resilience to link failures and help enterprises build multi-cloud applications and services.