3rd June 2011
Compuware have released details of their latest Top Cloud Provider Global Performance Rankings for April. The list is pulled together based on a sample app the company has been testing and tracking for performance through all the major cloud service providers across the globe. The results of the test weren’t wholly surprising, but drumroll please, in any case…
As you can see, this list gives a fair indication of which cloud provider is performing best on a global scale, with the figures representing response times for the Compuware application seen from various backbone locations around the world. And while there is little to separate Google's App Engine at the top of the list and Rackspace at number five, businesses currently looking for a switch to a new cloud infrastructure may be slightly concerned by the slow performance of many of Amazon's EC2 cloud options. Especially in the Asia-Pacific regions, where performance appears to be considerably lower than anywhere else in the world.
However, one region where Amazon EC2 did perform well (and perhaps this is the biggest surprise to take away from this list), was the East Coast of the US. Weighing in at a heady number six in the rankings, Amazon will be fairly chuffed with the performance of this Compuware app during the month of April - mainly because this was the period when the company experienced its infamous East Coast outage. The downtime was deemed so severe for American companies relying on the internet to trade that it made front page news across the globe, and was even suggested to be the potential 'death of cloud computing'.
With such high performance occurring during a period of extreme outage, it will be interesting to see how Amazon's East Coast infrastructure performs in Compuware's next test results, due to be released next month some time.
Watch this space for any interesting updates. For more information on what these results really mean, and Compuware's methodology for generating the results, visit: http://bit.ly/kiTBAF
Related stories: Application performance: Cloud's sticking point?
