Cloud Outages | All Providers Aren’t Created Equal

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The reliability of cloud service can vary significantly from provider to provider.

A 2015 report from cloud benchmarking service CloudHarmony found that Amazon’s EC2 compute service was the most reliable infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), with an uptime performance of 99.9974 percent during the year prior, InformationWeek reported.

Translated, that means the main Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud computing service was down just 2.01 hours in 2014.

AWS’ “S3” cloud storage recoreded 99.9951 percent uptime, or 2.69 hours of annual downtime.

Next among the largest cloud players was Google Compute Engine, which tallied a 99.9814 percent uptime performance.

That amounts to 3.4 hours of downtime in 2014.

For cloud storage, Google proved the leading provider with a 99.9996 percent uptime that left the service unavailable for just 14.23 minutes that entire year.

Both providers’ SLAs promise customers a minimum uptime of 99.95 percent.

On the other side of the spectrum is Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Platform. The compute service showed an uptime of 99.9374 percent in 2014.

That means Microsoft Azure was unusable by customers for nearly 43 hours, or well over a day and a half that year.

Its Object Storage cloud service was also the least reliable of the biggest players, with an availability of 99.985 percent, or nearly 11 hours of downtime.

To its credit, Microsoft makes public within days of an outage a detailed report of what went wrong.

Following a multi-day outage of CRM giant Salesforce.com’s software-as-a-service products in May, the CEO of one affected company told InformationWeek that the event had shaken his confidence in the vendor, but not in the efficacy of cloud. 

"I have never had this issue with any other software-as-a-service or even on-premises software where you could control your own issues," Mark Smith, who also serves as chief research officer at business consulting firm Ventana Research, was quoted as saying. "They cost companies, including mine, a whole day of work in revenue growth and selling, customer service, operations, billing, and overall productivity…and have offered nothing for the screw up."

To research and compare cloud providers and services, visit CloudHarmony’s Cloud Square dashboard.