Neutrality in Future Public Clouds: Implications and Challenges

With public cloud providers poised to become indispensable utility providers, neutrality-related mandates will likely emerge to ensure a level playing field among their customers (“tenants”). We analogize with net neutrality to discuss: (i) what form cloud neutrality might take, (ii) what lessons might the net neutrality debate have to offer, and (iii) in what ways cloud neutrality would be different from (and even more difficult than) net neutrality. We use idealized thought experiments and simple workload case studies to illustrate our points and conclude with a discussion of challenges and future directions. Our paper points to a rich and important area for future work.