  We contend that, analogously to the transition from resource-limited on-prem
computing to resource-abundant cloud computing, Internet data delivery should
also be adapted to a reality in which the cloud offers a virtually unlimited
resource, i.e., network capacity, and virtualization enables delegating local
tasks, such as routing and congestion control, to the cloud. This necessitates
rethinking the traditional roles of inter- and intra-domain routing and
conventional end-to-end congestion control.
  We introduce Optimized Cloudified Delivery (OCD), a holistic approach for
optimizing joint Internet/cloud data delivery, and evaluate OCD through
hundreds of thousands of file downloads from multiple locations. We start by
examining an OCD baseline approach: traffic from a source A to a destination B
successively passes through two cloud virtual machines operating as relays -
nearest to A and B; and the two cloud relays employ TCP split.
  We show that even this naive strategy can outperform recently proposed
improved end-to-end congestion control paradigms (BBR and PCC) by an order of
magnitude.
  Next, we present a protocol-free, ideal pipe model of data transmission, and
identify where today's Internet data delivery mechanisms diverge from this
model. We then design and implement OCD Pied Piper. Pied Piper leverages
various techniques, including novel kernel-based transport-layer accelerations,
to improve the Internet-Cloud interface so as to approximately match the ideal
network pipe model.
