Azure Trails AWS & Google in 2014 Uptime Numbers
The top IaaS providers are Azure, Google Compute Engine and Amazon Web Services. CloudHarmony, a company that monitors uptime indicators for major cloud services, provided cloud enthusiasts with a set of data that shows the actual number of outages as well as uptime percentages for each of the big three services.
Amazon Web Services won the top spot among the big three in regards to compute uptime. In 2014, AWS only suffered 2.01 hours of downtime. This mind blowing figure equates to Amazon being able to provide 99.9974% uptime for its customers. Google Compute Engine came in second with a total of 3.46 hours of downtime for 2014. Google’s overall uptime numbers equated to 99.9814%. Microsoft Azure rounded up the pack by having a total of 42.94 hours of downtime in 2014. Although this may sound like a lot of downtime, Microsoft was still able to post a triple 9 score in regards to uptime percentage. Microsoft Azure experienced an uptime percentage of 99.9388% in 2014.
CloudHarmony’s analytics hone in on the actual uptime numbers combined with the total number of outages. CloudHarmony reports that Amazon had 12 total outages in 2014. Google experienced 88 total outage incidents while Microsoft reports 103. Microsoft took the 3rd spot when comparing storage uptime numbers. Google took the first spot by only reporting 14.23 minutes of storage downtime in 2014. AWS S3 storage had 2.69 hours of downtime and Azure Object Storage experienced 10.89 hours of downtime in 2014.
Although Azure was ranked last out of the big three in terms of many of the popular categories, Azure has its sights set on 2015 and beyond. Like many outages, there is a story behind the downtime and Microsoft has apologized profusely for any unscheduled downtime on its blog for the incidents customers reported in 2014.
