Exploiting the Cloud Control Plane for Fun and Profit

Abstract

Cloud providers typically charge for their services. There are diverse pricing models which often follow a pay-per-use paradigm. The consumers' payments are expected to cover all cost which incurs to the provider for processing, storage, bandwidth, data centre operation and engineering efforts, among others. In contrast, the consumer management interfaces are free of charge as they are expected to cause only a minority of the load compared to the actual computing services. With new service models and more complex and powerful management abilities, it is time to rethink this decision. The paper shows how to exploit the control plane of AWS Lambda to implement stateful services practically for free and under some circumstances even guaranteed for free which if widely deployed would cause a monetary loss for the provider. It also elaborates on the consistency model for AWS Lambda.