Examining AWS’ uptime in 2014: Figures show marked improvement

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Having been ranked as one of the top cloud providers for uptime, new figures show Amazon Web Services (AWS) having a 41% reduction in performance issues quarter to quarter during 2014.

The figures, from CloudEndure, see AWS with 127 errors during Q114, a greater number than the following three quarters combined, with 43 in Q2, 37 in Q3, and 26 in Q4.

AWS EC2 was the most frequent faller in 2014, with 46 errors, compared to scalable DNS provider Route 53 (24), network monitoring service CloudWatch (20) and content delivery network CloudFront (20).

These numbers tie in nicely with CloudHarmony’s one year metrics released earlier in January. These numbers just recorded outages instead of errors, and found CloudFront and Route 53 with a clean bill of health, while EC2 had 12 outages over nine regions at an SLA of 99.9973%.

Picture credit: CloudEndure

By region, AWS’ data centres in North Virginia were hit hardest, with 64 errors in 2014, compared with 28 in Oregon and Sao Paolo, and 20 in Ireland. With new data centre regions springing up everywhere – most notably Frankfurt in October last year – 2015’s figures will certainly be interesting.

Ofir Ehrlich, co-founder at CloudEndure, notes the majority of these errors shouldn’t be a problem if your applications are architected correctly – such as running apps simultaneously in multiple regions, so if one does fall over then there is no impact.

In January the company looked at Microsoft’s 2014 figures and found significantly more Azure service interruptions in the final three quarters, with 28 in Q2. Survey data from Synergy in October saw Microsoft overtake the competition for second place in cloud infrastructure services. AWS, meanwhile, remains the standout performer in the cloud infrastructure space, while research from Skyhigh Networks showed how Amazon remains the most popular enterprise cloud service.

Read the full blog here.