The cloud war rages on. Microsoft continues to make inroad in its quest for cloud supremacy, even as Amazon and Google continue to pile on the pressure.
But when it comes to network reliability, Azure has the competition beat.
According to the network monitoring company ThousandEyes, Microsoft Azure provided more predictable network performance than Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services — both of which continued to suffer more in terms of latency, packet loss and jitters.
This latest study is part of its annual Public Cloud Performance Benchmark Report, where the firm gather metrics every 10 minutes from 27 user local vantage points in datacenters around the globe.
These were then pulled into 55 cloud regions across Microsoft, Google and Amazon cloud services.
Excellent performance from Azure means that developers deploying software on the platform can more reliably predict how their applications will run.
And the reason for this predictability is that Microsoft uses its own backbone to move data between users and services. This ensures that their network remains fast and highly reliable at all times.
AWS moves data on the public internet, which built from a constellation of service providers. This means that it is both unregulated and vulnerable to attacks. Google uses both models, a premium tier where traffic moves over its own backbone, and a standard tier that runs on public infrastructure.
ThousandEyes also found regional differences in cloud performance.
Google had three times the network latency of AWS and Microsoft between Europe and India.
In fact, reliability and predictability of network performance varied by region with both Azure and Google offering better network performance stability than AWS in Asia. AWS had 35% the network performance stability of Google and 56% less than Azure.
Connecting Europe to Singapore, Azure actually came out 1.5 times faster than AWS.
At the end of the day, Microsoft maybe playing from behind as it tries to catch up to AWS, but its focus on networking and connectivity has already started to pay dividends.
The full report is available here.
