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AWS Beats Main Cloud Rivals in 2014 Reliability
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud was last year more reliable than main competitors Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform, according to figures from CloudHarmony Inc., which tracks service provider metrics.
According to the company's CloudSquare Service Status site, four different AWS services were down for a total of 4.9 hours. The Amazon EC2 compute service suffered 12 outages for a total of 2.14 hours downtime, garnering a 99.9973 percent "365-day availability" rating.
Following are some figures gleaned from the CloudHarmony site:
| Cloud Provider Service |
Outages |
Downtime |
| AWS |
| Amazon EC2 (compute) | 12 | 2.14 hours |
| Amazon S3 (storage) | 26 | 2.8 hours |
| Microsoft Azure |
| Virtual Machines | 104 | 43.1 hours |
| Object Storage | 139 | 10.92 hours |
| Google Cloud Platform |
| Compute Engine | 154 | 3.98 hours |
| Cloud Storage | 13 | 18.52 minutes |
The AWS cloud also saw a strong reliability increase in 2014, according to CloudEndure, another company that tracks cloud provider uptime and other metrics, in this case using AWS' own reporting mechanism.
"Data collected from AWS Health Dashboard reporting shows a 41 percent quarter-over-quarter reduction in number of global AWS performance issues, going down from 127 errors in Q1 to 26 in Q4, 2014," the company said. The numbers don't jive because the companies use different metrics.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.