CloudHarmony found that 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.

The cloud services performance analyst said AWS EC2 recorded 2.41 hours of downtime across 20 outages in 2014, while the Google Cloud Platform storage service experienced 14 minutes of downtime 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 cloud services providers (CSPs) are getting better at preventing outages, but CloudHarmony’s data also indicated that some consumers are ignoring these outages altogether.

Click here for Talkin’ Cloud’s Top 100 CSP list

In fact, CloudHarmony found that Azure, CenturyLink (CTL) and Digital Ocean provided popular cloud services despite significant downtime in 2014. (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 how often more than 48 CSPs experience 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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