Microsoft continues to make end roads in its growing competition with Amazon for cloud services market share. Alongside a recent string of noteworthy collaborative partnerships that include Walmart and Gap, Microsoft can now tout its Azure services reliability numbers when compared to Amazon Web Services.
According to network monitoring company ThousandEyes, Microsoft’s Azure cloud services “provided more predictable network performance than Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services.”
In its annual Public Cloud Performance Benchmark Report, ThousandEyes used performance metrics gathered every 10 minutes from 27 users location vantage points in data centers around the globe and pulled them into 55 cloud regions across Microsoft, Google and Amazon’s cloud services.
In doing so, ThousandEyes found that Google’s Cloud Platform and AWS fluctuated more than Microsoft’s Azure services when factoring in latency, issues, packet losses or app jitters.
ThousandEyes’ senior product manager Archana Kesavan sums up Microsoft’s Azure test results with, “their network is fast and highly reliable.”
More to the point, Kesavan notes that part of AWS reliability issues stem from how AWS transports date. According to a report from LightReading.com, AWS moves data on the public Internet, which is unregulated, vulnerable to attacks, and built from a constellation of service providers. In moving data this way Amazon Cloud services, “has an element of risk associated with it,” says Kesavan. Google, on the other hand, offers a similar approach as Microsoft where it allows its top-tier users to transmit data using its own backbone, while its more standard users are stuck with an AWS-like internet risky means of data transportation.
However, even in offering a top-tier option, Google still falls short of Microsoft’s Azure services reliability standards, by 56% on average while also racking up 3x the latency of AWS when moving data from European and Indian regions.
At the end of the day, Microsoft is playing from behind in the market and mindshare game when compared to AWS. However, as the cloud services market matures, nuances such as reliability, speed, and integration appear to be metrics that the company is focusing on, to level the playing field.