A cloud analysis company, ThousandEyes looked at the five major public cloud providers to measure global network performance.
Choosing the best cloud service provider can be tricky. ThousandEyes released the results of the second annual Cloud Performance Benchmark to help confused enterprises. ThousandEyes looked at the major public cloud providers: Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Benchmarks are done by analyzing over 320 million data points from 98 global locations over 30 days. The company didn’t only measure the raw speed but also looked at the latency, jitter and data loss.
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No overall winner
It is safe to say that there is no overall winner. It depends on your location and the ISP you use. There are also specific situations such a China’s Great Firewall of China which can affect performance negatively while crossing. Research author and director of product marketing, Archana Kesavan, said in a statement:
“When businesses need to decide which cloud provider best meets their needs, one metric that’s notably missing from their assessments has been performance data, mainly because it’s never been available or has, at best, been myopic. Understanding cloud performance is essential for planning and for ongoing measurement so you can be assured that you’re providing customers and employees with the best possible performance.”
AWS
When compared to Azure and GCP, AWS’s has lower performance predictability due to its reliance on the internet rather than leveraging its own backbone. However, its low latency and performance predictability have improved.
Azure
Azure uses its own backbone to carry traffic to cloud hosting regions, so it’s strong network performance continues. In terms of performance predictability, Azure became on top despite a slight decrease from last year.
Google Cloud
GCP has a strong performance in most regions to favor the use of its backbone for traffic delivery. It is harder for users to understand network paths and performance because Google Cloud decreased the visibility of their internal network.
Alibaba Cloud
In terms of connectivity patterns, regional locations, and region naming constructs of Alibaba Cloud resembles AWS. Alibaba Cloud depends heavily on the internet rather than on a private network backbone. Inter-region traffic between Alibaba Cloud regions is not contained within its own infrastructure, unlike other cloud providers.
IBM Cloud
IBM prefers a hybrid approach to traffic delivery. IBM uses both its private backbone and the internet. It shifts in response to regions its users accessing.
Conclusion
To choose the best cloud service for you, you should look closely at price, location, and overall network performance. If you want to take a more detailed look at ThousandEyes’s report on the company’s website.