AWS, Google Public IaaS Clouds were Most Reliable in 2014

Which cloud services providers (CSPs) offered the most uptime in 2014? Cloud services performance analyst CloudHarmony found that the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Google Cloud Platform were two of the top-performing public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds in 2014.

While downtime was a problem for some CSPs last year, both AWS EC2 and the Google Cloud Platform maintained the best uptime percentages, CloudHarmony said.

AWS EC2 recorded 2.41 hours of downtime across 20 outages in 2014, which represented 99.9974 percent uptime, according to CloudHarmony.

Also, CloudHarmony found that the Google Cloud Platform storage service experienced 14 minutes of downtime last year for a 99.9996 uptime percentage.

“The more established players are fine-tuning their systems and becoming quite stable,” CloudHarmony CEO Jason Read told Network World. “AWS has been providing cloud services longer than anyone in the market and Google uses its existing infrastructure for its cloud, so it too has a long track record of managing a reliable distributed system.”

Other CloudHarmony findings included:

Donnie Berkholz, a senior analyst at industry analyst firm RedMonk, said he believes CSPs are getting better at preventing outages, but CloudHarmony’s data also indicated that some cloud computing buyers are ignoring these outages altogether.

In fact, CloudHarmony found that Azure, CenturyLink (CTL) and Digital Ocean were popular cloud services despite higher-than-average downtime. (CenturyLink experienced about 26 hours of downtime in 2014, while Digital Ocean had roughly 16 hours of downtime.)

“Outage frequency, within a certain range, isn’t a blocker on adoption of an otherwise compelling cloud provider,” Berkholz said. “The question [then] isn’t which provider is best – but what is the limit of what customers find acceptable?”

CloudHarmony monitors more than 48 CSPs for downtime. This cloud services performance analyst maintains web servers in these vendors’ clouds and tracks when their services are unavailable.

CloudHarmony’s full data set is available here.

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