Download Drafting Behind Akamai - Northwestern University

Drafting Behind Akamai (TravelocityBased Detouring)
Aleksandar Kuzmanovic
Northwestern University
Joint work with:
A. Su, D. Choffnes, and F. Bustamante
To appear in Sigcomm 2006
http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~akuzma/
Drafting Behind Akamai
Drafting
Detour
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Drafting Behind Akamai
Motivation
Overlay networks
– Can’t change IP, so change the layers above
– E.g., end-point multicast
Common problem
– Build the “view” of the underlying network
– Passive and active measurements
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Problem
Independent measurements
– Redundant
– Non-scalable
– Can cause problems
• E.g., synchronization
Common service needed
– Knowledge plane - MIT
– A routing underlay for overlays - Princeton
– Network Weather Service - Berkeley
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Our Approach
Fact
– CDNs (e.g., Akamai) perform extensive network
and server measurements
• Publish the results through DNS over short time scales
Can overlay networks reuse measurements
collected by production CDNs?
– Significantly reduce the amount of measurements
(a complementary service)
– No new infrastructure need to be deployed
– Inherit the robustness of DNS
– Easy integration with existing systems
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CDN-Driven One-Hop Source Routing
D
A1
E1
A2
E2
An
En
S
DNS Server
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Key Questions
How does Akamai work?
– DNS translation
– How many web replicas does a client see?
– Impact of different sites (e.g., Yahoo vs. NY
Times)?
– DNS redirection dynamics?
– Network or server latency?
An example application: one-hop source
routing
– Mapping CDN servers to overlay nodes
– Low-overhead protocols for exploiting CDN
redirections
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DNS “Black Magic”
Root DNS Server
Akamai High-Level
DNS Server
Top-Level Domain
DNS Server
www.pcworld.com
www.pcworld.com
a1694.g.akmai.net
CNAME:
images.pcworld.com
www.pcworld.com
a1694.g.akamai.net
Akamai Low-Level
PCWorld Authoritative
DNS Server
a1694.g.akmai.net DNS Server
2 ip addresses of
Local DNS Server Akamai Edge Servers
images.pcworld.com
PCWorld
Web Server
2 ip addresses of
www.pcworld.com
Akamai Edge Servers
Akamai
Edge Server
Web
Client
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Measuring Akamai
2-months long measurement
140 PlanetLab (PL) nodes
– 50 US and Canada, 35 Europe, 18 Asia, 8 South
America, the rest randomly scattered
Every 20 sec, each PL node queries an
appropriate CNAME for
– Yahoo, CNN, Fox News, NY Times, etc.
Akamai
Edge Server 1
Akamai Low-Level
DNS Server
.……
Akamai
Edge Server 3
PL Node
A. Kuzmanovic
Akamai
Edge Server 2
Drafting Behind Akamai
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Initial Results
Berkeley
Purdue
day
night
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Server Diversity for Yahoo
Majority of PL nodes
see between 10 and 50
Akamai edge-servers
Nodes far away
from Akamai
hot-spots
Good overlay-to-CDN
mapping candidates
A. Kuzmanovic
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Drafting Behind Akamai
Multiple Akamai Customers
Yahoo and NYTimes are
not hosted in U. Oregon
Amazon is not hosted
on UMass and LBNL
FEMA is poor!
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Redirection Dynamics
Brazil
Berkeley
Korea
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Key Questions
How does Akamai work?
– DNS translation
– How many web replicas does a client see?
– Impact of different sites (e.g., Yahoo vs. NY
Times)?
– DNS redirection dynamics?
– Network or server latency?
Potentials for one-hop source routing?
– Mapping CDN servers to overlay nodes
– Low-overhead protocols for exploiting CDN
redirections
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Methodology
10 Best
Akamai
Edge Servers
………
Akamai Low-Level
DNS Server
Planet Lab Node
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Do CDN redirections correlate to network
latencies? (1)
Rank = r1+r2-1
– 16 means perfect correlation
– 0 means poor correlation
MIT and Amsterdam
are excellent
Brazil is poor
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Do CDN redirections correlate to network
latencies? (2)
70% paths are
among best 10%
97% better than
average
CNN is poor!
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Akamai-Driven One-Hop Source Routing
Redirections driven by
network conditions
D
Potential for
CDN-to-overlay mapping
A1
E1
A2
E2
An
S
DNS Server
Redirection dynamics
sufficiently small for
network control
En
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Methodology
Akamai path 1
Akamai path 2
Destination
Akamai path 3
Akamai path 1
Akamai path 10
Akamai path 2
Akamai path 3
Akamai Low-Level
DNS Server
Direct Path
Akamai path 10
Source
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Akamai-driven source routing (1)
Taiwan-UK
UK-Taiwan
80% Taiwan
15% Japan
5 % U.S.
75% U.K.
25% U.S.
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Akamai-driven source routing (2)
Experiment: US (6), Europe (3), S. America (2), Asia (3)
Direct paths better
than Akamai paths
Akamai and direct
paths have similar
performance
25% of Akamai
paths better than
direct paths
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Path pruning
Fact
– Not always is Akamai-driven path better than the
direct one
Practical issues
– How frequently to make a decision whether to use
the direct or the Akamai path?
– Should one use
• the first (of the 2 paths) returned by Akamai (FAS)
• the better (of the 2 paths) returned by Akamai (BTAS)
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Path Pruning Result
BTAS better than FAS
Direct path accounts for
78% of the gain
2 hours update frequency
before the performance declines
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Conclusions
Reuse measurements performed by CDNs
Reverse-engineering Akamai
– DNS redirections sufficiently small
– Strong correlation to network conditions
– All clients see a large number of paths
CDN-driven one-hop source routing
– 25% of Akamai paths outperform direct paths
– 50% of nodes “discovered” by Akamai outperform
direct paths
– Low-overhead pruning algorithms
Global Internet “weather-report” service for
little to no cost
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