In the last year, Microsoft's Azure cloud service trailed its two biggest competitors--Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine--in uptime. Or, put another way, it was the "winner" when it came to downtime.
According to cloud benchmarking company CloudHarmomy, Amazon took the uptime crown in 2014. Its EC2 Compute Service provided 99.9974 percent uptime performance, meaning it was down for a total of 2.01 hours during the year. Google’s Compute Engine, meanwhile, offered 99.9814 percent uptime for the year, down for a total of 3.46 hours.
If you look at it in terms of service levels, Amazon provided four-nines uptime, while Google provided three-nines uptime. Microsoft also provided three-nines uptime, with its compute service available for 99.9388 percent of the time, but this translates to downtime of 42.94 hours.
In terms of number of outages, Amazon had 12, Google had 88, and Microsoft had 103.
Looking at the data from a storage perspective, Google did better than Amazon, but Microsoft still came in third of the three. Google Cloud Storage offered 99.9996 percent uptime, with eight outages and 14.23 minutes downtime; Amazon’s S3 service provided 99.9952 percent availability (with 23 outages and 2.69 total hours of downtime); and Microsoft Azure Object Storage provided 99.9853 percent uptime (138 outages and 10.89 hours of downtime).
Did your cloud provider let you “down” at all in 2014? If so, what were the repercussions? Please let us know in the comments section below.
