Network intelligence company ThousandEyes has revealed the findings from a first of its kind industry report, measuring the global network performance of the ‘big three’ major public cloud providers – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

The 2018 Public Cloud Performance Benchmark Report was created to provide an agnostic resource for enterprise IT business leaders to help guide their multi-cloud decision-making process.

Key findings

• Architectural differences between providers: Traffic enters the AWS network closest to the target region, but for GCP and Azure, traffic enters closest to the users.
• Performance varies by region: Geographical performance variations exist across the three cloud providers, most noticeably in the LATAM and Asia regions.
• Intra-cloud network performance is strong: Multi-cloud performance between the three providers is consistent and reliable.
• The cloud is always evolving: As cloud providers are making continuous changes to their infrastructure, performance can vary either positively or negatively.

Top European findings on public cloud performance

• Locations of cloud data centres directly impact network latency; when connecting Europe to India, GCP exhibited three times the network latency compared to AWS and Azure.
• In Asia, GCP and Azure exhibited more network performance stability than AWS, which demonstrated 35% less network performance stability than GCP and 56% less than Azure.
• When connecting Europe to Singapore, AWS and GCP were 1.5 times slower than Azure.

Overall, the performance data indicates comparable and robust network performance across all three cloud providers, yet geographical exceptions exist.

“Multi-national organisations that are embracing digital transformation and venturing into the cloud need to be aware of the geographical performance differences between the major public clouds when making global multi-cloud decisions,” said Archana Kesevan, senior product marketing manager at ThousandEyes.

“To help global businesses with this assessment,ThousandEyes is providing an unbiased, third-party perspective on public cloud performance as it relates to end-user experience — and at the same time, breaking the mould of survey-based research and vendor-led reporting.”

“As enterprises increasingly move to cloud-first IT strategies, IT increasingly depends upon infrastructure assets they don’t control,” said Jason Bloomberg, president at Intellyx. 

“The 2018 ThousandEyes Public Cloud Performance Benchmark Report lifts the veil obscuring region-to- region and cloud-to-cloud performance within and between public clouds, providing IT infrastructure execs critical intelligence on the performance they can expect from single cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid IT environments.”

The 2018 ThousandEyes Public Cloud Performance Benchmark Report is based on metric data from network performance measurements, such as packet loss, latency and jitter. Performance data was collected over a period of 30 days and results derived from over 50 million data points, using both end-to-end performance and in-depth path measurement techniques.