Study on public cloud performance: AWS, GCP, Azure, Alibaba and IBM Cloud

There are notable network performance and connectivity differences between the five major public cloud providers – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud and IBM Cloud, ThousandEyes reveals.

public cloud performance

A look at public cloud performance

While Google Cloud and Azure rely heavily on their private backbone networks to transport their customer traffic, protecting it from performance variations associated with delivering over the public Internet, AWS and Alibaba Cloud rely heavily on the public Internet for the majority of transport, resulting in greater operational risk that can impact performance predictability. IBM takes a hybrid approach that varies regionally.

Latin America and Asia have the highest performance variations across all clouds, whereas in North America, cloud performance is generally comparable.

AWS Global Accelerator was introduced in November 2018 to let customers use the AWS private backbone network for a fee – rather than use the public Internet, which is AWS’ default behavior.

Performance issues

While there are many examples of performance gains in various regions around the world, the Global Accelerator is not a one-size-fits-all solution, as there are several examples where the Internet actually performs faster and more reliably than Global Accelerator, or, the results are negligible.

Businesses looking to get every performance edge possible should consider which broadband ISP provider they select, depending on which cloud they most heavily rely upon. There are performance gains and losses depending on which broadband provider businesses use to connect to each cloud.

Despite Alibaba’s origins in China, it experiences packet loss when crossing through China’s Great Firewall just as all the other cloud providers do, showing it does not get any preferential treatment.

Enterprises serving customers in China, but hesitant to pick a hosting region in China due to stringent regulations on traffic and data privacy, might consider Hong Kong as a viable option – Alibaba Cloud traffic experienced the least packet loss from Hong Kong to China, followed by Azure and IBM.

Archana Kesavan, research author and director of product marketing at ThousandEyes said: “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.”

AWS

AWS generally demonstrates low latency and made some minor improvements over the last year. Its performance predictability metrics, however, noticeably improved, with its most dramatic change in Asia, which showed a 42 percent reduction in variability over last year.

However, when compared to Azure and GCP, it still has lower performance predictability due to its extensive reliance on the Internet rather than leveraging its own backbone for delivery.

Azure

Azure continues its strong network performance based on aggressive use of its own backbone to carry user traffic to cloud hosting regions. Standout changes from 2018 to 2019 include on average a 50 percent improvement in performance predictability in Sydney, whereas in India, there was a 31 percent decrease in performance predictability.

Despite a slight decrease year over year, Azure continues to lead in performance predictability in Asia when compared to the other cloud providers.

Google Cloud

Google Cloud continues to favor use of its own backbone for user to cloud hosting region traffic delivery and has strong performance in most regions, but it still has some significant global gaps that haven’t been resolved since last year’s report.

Traffic from Europe and Africa takes 2.5-3 times longer to get to India, going around the rest of the world instead of taking a direct route. Google Cloud also decreased visibility into their internal network, making it harder for its users to understand its network paths and performance.

Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud offers comparable performance to other cloud providers. It closely resembles AWS in terms of connectivity patterns, region locations, and even region naming constructs. Like AWS, Alibaba Cloud leans heavily on the Internet rather than their own private network backbone for the majority of user traffic transport.

Uniquely, inter-region traffic between Alibaba Cloud regions is not contained within their own cloud infrastructure as it is for the other four, instead it exits Alibaba Cloud, traverses the Internet and then makes its way back into Alibaba Cloud.

IBM Cloud

IBM Cloud performance is comparable to the major players. IBM takes a hybrid approach to traffic delivery, fluctuating between using its own private backbone and the public Internet, depending on which regions user traffic is accessing.

Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst, ZK Research said: “Historically, most IT professionals select cloud providers based on factors such as price or proximity to users, but often overlook the underlying network architecture of the cloud providers, which can have a significant impact on performance.”

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