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Microsoft Azure Overtakes Amazon's Cloud In Performance Test
alphadogg writes "Microsoft Azure's cloud outperformed Amazon Web Services in a series of rigorous tests conducted by Nasuni, a storage vendor that annually benchmarks cloud service providers (CSPs). Nasuni uses public cloud resources in its enterprise storage offering, so each year the company conducts a series of rigorous tests on the top CSPs' clouds in an effort to see which companies offer the best performing, most reliable infrastructure. Last year, Amazon Web Services' cloud came out on top, but this year Microsoft Azure outperformed AWS in performance and reliability measures. AWS is still better at handling extra-large storage volumes, while Nasuni found that the two OpenStack powered clouds it tested — from HP and Rackspace — were lacking, particularly at larger scales."
So Microsoft Azure is now web scale? Does it use MongoDB?
Azure has won cloud performance comparisons in the past, including a major 11-months test concluding two years ago. (via)
--libman
When no one's using the platform of course its going to be faster than the competition when shared resources are concerned.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
Hmm.... I thought Ubuntu was only used by people with MS background
I wish there was a standard definition of "cloud". From the article, it sounds like they are just creating and deleting AWS S3 objects and timing the transfer rates. I guess that's in line with the traditional definition of a cloud server, but I'd be more interested in seeing how EC2 stacks up against the competition.
I'm sure S3 object benchmarks mean something to someone, but seems to be an awfully simplistic measurement. It'd be more useful to see how well each service scales across many users since individual object manipulation time is only a small part of the story for people that depend on the cloud for scalability. It could take one provider more time to manipulate a single object, but still be faster when serving that object to a million users.
Nasuni scores $20M to build out storage sales effort
Nasuni, which helps distributed companies manage their cloud storage securely, has $20 million in a new funding round — led by a mystery investor — to help it pay for new features and expand sales and marketing, said CEO Andres Rodriguez.
http://gigaom.com/2012/10/30/nasuni-scores-20m-to-build-out-storage-sales-effort/
what do you think is powering azure?
captcha: donkeys
Upload speed shouldnt be your only benchmark. If I upload a 10GB file to my raspberry pi server in the other room, its way quicker than either of these. Clearly raspberry pis overtake Azure and Amazon's cloud.
How does Joyent compare?
Why not, considering that Azure will likely cost 2-3 times what AWS costs. Shouldn't MS be able to deliver a little more performance on dumb reads & writes. Even if the service is hosted on Windows boxes, surely they use something likely NAS for the actual backing store -- and the service hosting the service should be only a small portion of the end-to-end stack.
There's nothing new here, The cleanest dirty shirt is still dirty.
There no reason to use "cloud" services, especially those hosted in the US (due to Patriot Act)
You have three primary use cases for clouds, if you're not one of these, don't use clouds, don't use VPS and just buy your own equipment:
a) Gaming servers - Clouds/VPS are a no-no. Gaming must squeeze out all the performance possible, and all cloud systems fail or crash at heavy loads.
b) CDN end points - Particularly for streaming(eg netflix,) this is again a no-no, since you have no control over CPU process/thread allocations.
c) Grid Computing - Same with Gaming servers, heavy CPU load makes this a non-starter
Where should you use cloud/VPS? ... buying a Rasberry Pi and loading your site on it and running it off a SOHO connection.
1) Small web hosting - Vanity, business-card sites, the kind that get so little traffic they don't justify the cost of a real server. But VPS solutions are overpriced for these as well. You're still better off
2) Fault-tolerance - In the case of Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft themselves, they have a lot of file servers (think Windows Update, iTunes, Xbox Marketplace/Vuze, and similar where the files are downloaded) because they can scale the loads as necessary. These are very specific and very engineered things. Since they own the equipment, it's effectively free for them to use it. Everything unused they can sell services to the public.
Openstack is effectively just ISP's seeing $'s in their eyes that they can offer an inferior offering to AWS and charge the same price. Hopefully a lot of these cloud vendors merge or die and some actual competition happens. Right now what is being offered is all crap.
https://www.zunicore.com/
Play with the knobs the the first page...
1 core, 1GB ram, 10GB space , 30$/mo , ok that doesn't look so bad if I never use the damn thing.
4 core, 8GB ram, 100GB space, 229.60/mo, you got to be kidding me, I can buy a real server every month for that price with those specs.
And this says nothing about bandwidth, error correction, disk performance, or anything else that you'd get if you actually bought the physical machine.
Azure has nothing running on it. Amazon's cloud had to handle all those annoying customers soaking up their CPU and network.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
Riiiiiiight. Because Amazon is nothing but sunshine and bunnies. What an idiot you are.
1. I don't know who these Nasuni people are and am not sure why I should care.
2. My experience of Microsoft over 2 decades is of a company that seems to be mostly stumbling along and not quite getting things right, occasionally hitting the target seemingly by accident, engaging in questionable business practices to ensure their market position and generally being a company many avoid doing business with if they can.
3. Amazon, by contrast has been a pleasure to do business with from my first day as a customer, continually improves it's services in a way that most people seem happy with, occasionally surprises me with things like AutoRip and is a company that most of my family (extended too) is happy to do business with. Dealing with Amazon as a partner may leave something to be desired, but dealing with Amazon as a customer is almost always a pleasure.
Given that MIcrosoft is a company that thrives by forcing customers to accept what *it* wants, while Amazon seems to be a company that thrives on giving customers what they want, my initial reaction to this report is:
Meh. So what? It's a little bit faster now - but ... Microsoft. Amazon will probably narrow and exceed that performance gap in a reasonable time frame if that's what their customers find important. So jumping over to Azure based on this report might make short-term sense, but doesn't make sense to the long-term thinker.
Addendum: What all of the above really says is that any genuine talent or ability Microsoft may have is undermined by how it chooses to do business and the resulting reputation it has earned. Which is a damned shame, particularly for all the people that work there and believe in what they do.
Windows mostly.
If you've never watched a good, smaller company go under,
Good small companies do not go under (per definition). Shitty small companies with crap products and managers to match go under. If what you are blabbing about was true, there would be no companies making software for Windows.
Last year, Amazon Web Services' cloud came out on top, but this year Microsoft Azure outperformed AWS in performance and reliability measures.
Well, the difference is last year there was a leap day, which took Azure down for half the day, and this year there wasn't!
And what a special kind of idiot you are, to fall into schoolyard thinking. Is Amazon evil? Yes. Does that make Microsoft less evil? No.
Riiiight. Namecalling. What a fuckhead you are.
See how that works? I don't know you, but called you a fuckhead. You don't know me but are willing to hurl insults. Two can play at that game, you inbred shiteating fuckface.
Also, I never said I liked Amazon. Go reread what I wrote, dumbass.
Stacker.
Spyglass.
Both were cheated and then had lawsuits complete the bankruptcy.
And MS take over their assets.
You must be kidding. These days Ubuntu gets more irrational hate on slashdot than Microsoft does. According to slashdot Mark Shuttleworth is killing kittens, kicking dogs, insulting disabled veterans, sniffing peoples underwear, and channeling Steve Jobs ghost.
I know your type. Go eat shit, little freetard.
>Azure is strictly windows and strictly Microsoft
Um - no. It used to be windows and MS stack only. It's not any more.
Spoken by a Slackware enthusiast from his mother's basement.
Azure has an interesting pricing model. The bottom level costs nothing, but the next level up is ridiculous, though the specs are all better than the others.
That position seems to be eroding. Microsoft can give you HIPAA/HITECH, SOX, GLB and FDA regulatory compliance cheaper than linux, because the "regulatory grade" linux vendors like Red Hat are charging quite a bit more than Microsoft now. I'm allowed to run any number of Windows systems on Hyper-V, which is stable and reliable, or I can pay for every host on RHEVM, which is not reliable and doesn't really work 100% unless you've got a Microsoft Active Directory backend anyway. FreeIPA is slowly achieving parity (by picking up AD features) but FOSS-style LDAP/starttls and solidly secure old LDAPS are not supported by RHEVM which was built around Microsoft-style kerberized AD with Microsoft-style groups.
Red Hat turned their cash cow over to a bunch of unpaid kids, who made a really great college student OS out of what used to be a great enterprise server, but meanwhile Microsoft built a CLI, an RTL, and a solid virtualization environment. If it wasn't for the suckiness of MS SQL server there'd be no commercial advantage to running linux any more, it's just cheaper (in a regulated environment) to run Microsoft.
Ironically, Ubuntu runs on Azure these days (it's listed as one of the stock options when you create a new VM).
Because Azure is empty unlike Amazon's servers which are choca-block full with crap.
Saw this right after I read a news item that said they just 'forgot' to renew their certs. They really promote confidence!
http://technology.inquirer.net/23309/microsoft-lapse-cause-outages-in-azure-service
Not touching this with a ten-foot nyancat rainbow.
Like in this case a decade ago.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Next day, all of Azure is down.
MS is going to have to pay Nasuni more next year, to cover the loss in credibility.