Whowas: A Platform For Measuring Web Deployments On Iaas Clouds

Public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds such as Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure host an increasing number of web services. The dynamic, pay-as-you-go nature of modern IaaS systems enable web services to scale up or down with demand, and only pay for the resources they need. We are unaware, however, of any studies reporting on measurements of the patterns of usage over time in IaaS clouds as seen in practice. We fill this gap, offering a measurement platform that we call WhoWas. Using active, but lightweight, probing, it enables associating web content to public IP addresses on a day-by-day basis. We exercise WhoWas to provide the first measurement study of churn rates in EC2 and Azure, the efficacy of IP blacklists for malicious activity in clouds, the rate of adoption of new web software by public cloud customers, and more.