Microsoft Azure tops Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services in providing predicable latency, packet loss and jitter, according to network monitoring company ThousandEyes.

Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading

November 8, 2018

3 Min Read
Microsoft Beats Amazon & Google for Network Reliability – Research

Microsoft Azure provides more predictable network performance than Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, according to research released Thursday by network monitoring company ThousandEyes.

Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services Inc. fluctuate more unpredictably than Microsoft Azure in terms of latency, packet loss and jitter, according to the study.

That means developers deploying software on Azure can more reliably predict application performance, Archana Kesavan, ThousandEyes senior product marketing manager and report author, tells Light Reading.

The reason for Microsoft's predictability: Microsoft uses its own backbone to move data between users and services. "Their network is fast and highly reliable," Kesavan says.

Figure 1: ThousandEyes' Archana Kesavan seems to have only two eyes. ThousandEyes' Archana Kesavan seems to have only two eyes.

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AWS moves data on the public Internet, which is unregulated, vulnerable to attacks, and built from a constellation of service providers. "Operationally, doing business on the Internet has an element of risk associated with it," Kesavan says.

Google uses both models -- a premium tier where traffic moves over its own backbone, and a standard tier, which uses the public Internet to connect services to users, Kesavan notes. (See Google Launches Dedicated Connectivity for Hybrid Cloud and Google Offering Tiered Networking for Cloud Customers.)

For telcos and other communications service providers, cloud providers relying on their own backbones is bad news, because it means less business for them, Kesavan notes.

The ThousandEyes Public Cloud Performance and Benchmark report, released Thursday, compares performance of the three major public cloud providers. It's designed to help guide enterprise IT business leaders' multicloud decision making.

Figure 2: ThousandEyes gathered network performance metrics every 10 minutes from 27 user location vantage points in data centers around the globe, to 55 cloud regions across all three providers. ThousandEyes gathered network performance metrics every 10 minutes from 27 user location vantage points in data centers around the globe, to 55 cloud regions across all three providers.

Although the three cloud platforms are competitors, they peer directly with one another, eliminating dependence on third-party ISPs, ThousandEyes said in a statement. Also, traffic almost never leaves provider backbone networks for cloud-to-cloud communications, which minimizes loss and jitter in end-to-end communications. Traffic only leaves the backbone when in transit to and from the user. "Decision-makers need not worry about performance in multicloud architectures," the company said.

ThousandEyes found regional differences in cloud performance: Google had three times the network latency of AWS and Microsoft between Europe and India.

Reliability and predictability of network performance varied by region: Google and Azure had more network performance stability than AWS in Asia, ThousandEyes said. AWS had 35% the network performance stability of Google and 56% less than Azure.

And connecting Europe to Singapore, Azure was 1.5 times faster than AWS and Google.

The full report is available here: ThousandEyes Public Cloud Performance and Benchmark

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About the Author(s)

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

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