InsightaaS: We generally highlight a single third-party post on Across the Net, but we decided to try a two-fer today. In the past week, Ohad Finker, editor of CloudEndure’s The NinesObserver blog site, has published analyses of service figures for Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services – and given that reliability is often cited as a cloud objection, we thought we’d highlight both, to bring some facts to the debate.
The AWS figures are notable for the very small numbers of issues involved in service delivery/ Data sourced from AWS’s Service Health Dashboards shows that “performance issues” decreased from 8 in 1Q14 to 4 in 2Q14, while “other errors” increased from 33 to 48. A regional breakdown shows that 17 of these issues are “global”, while 2Q regional deliver centre errors ranged from 12 (northern Virginia) to just outages one in Sao Paulo, Tokyo and Singapore.
The data for Microsoft Azure indicates many more “services” issues – 201 in 2Q14, vs. 259 in 1Q14 – though to be fair, there’s no indication that these stats are directly comparable to those reported for AWS. Finker does make the point that “Q2 issues show increased Service Degradation and Interruption, which carry more severe effects on application availability,” so there is evidence that some Microsoft Azure customers had delivery problems in 2Q – especially with respect to Service Interruption, where recorded incidents leapt from 3 in 1Q14 to 28 in 2Q14.
Overall, the data paints the picture of cloud a generally-reliable source of service. Additionally, the mere availability of the data and analysis helps indicate why cloud continues to grow. An industry willing to expose its failures to scrutiny will likely learn to avoid repeating mistakes – and that in turn helps fuel continuous improvement and better performance levels.
Amazon Web Services
Data collected from AWS Health Dashboard reporting shows a 50% decline in global AWS performance issues–from 8 in Q1 2014 to just 4 in Q2 2014. Other, less critical errors, increased from 33 to 48. The data also shows that Northern Virginia recorded the most highest number of errors–12, of which 2 were performance issues. Northern California followed with 8 errors– only one of which was a performance issue. Services that are not region-specific (Global) recorded 17 errors, of which just one was a performance issue. Sao Paulo, Tokyo and Singapore recorded one error (with no performance issues in Q2 2014)…
Microsoft Azure
In Q2 2014 Microsoft Azure experienced 201 service issues, as compared to 259 in Q1 2014–a 22% improvement. However, Q2 service issues tended to be more severe: Service Interruptions increased over 9-fold, from 3 to 28, and Service Degradation increased from 88 to 131, a 49% increase. Service Information decreased from 168 to 42–a 75% decline.
