How To Compare Cloud Providers, Services, and Prices
We recently conducted a publicly available study on the largest European Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) to measure price-performance value in the industry. The findings are packaged in our 2017 Top 10 European Cloud Providers reports.
Based on a transparent methodology, we ranked the top 10 European cloud service providers to help the enterprise with an unbiased view of the marketplace. The report analyzes the performance of four different VM sizes for each of the the top 10 European cloud service providers, and reports on the performance and stability results of CPU, memory, and block storage.
The results uncovered a 2.4x difference on VM performance alone (CPU and memory) and a 12.6x block storage performance difference between the first and tenth ranked IaaS service providers analyzed in the report. For cloud consumers, this disparity highlights the critical need to conduct performance testing on both providers and existing internal infrastructure prior to selecting a CSP. Failure to conduct this analysis amplifies any risk associated with overspending or application performance issues.
The following 10 IaaS providers were included in the 2017 Top 10 European Cloud Providers report:
- 1&1
- Amazon Web Services
- CenturyLink
- DigitalOcean
- Dimension Data
- Google Compute Engine
- IBM SoftLayer
- Microsoft Azure
- OVH
- Rackspace
Download the full 2017 report FREE
The graph below ranks the top 10 European cloud service providers based on their overall CloudSpecs™ Score. Please refer to the complete 2017 Cloud IaaS Providers Comparison for full details on testing methodology and ranking criteria.
Key Findings of the 2017 Top 10 European Cloud Service Providers
- Looking solely at performance, virtual machines (VMs) differed by 2.4x across CSPs. For block storage IOPS, that difference spread by 12.6x across CSPs.
- 1&1’s VMs demonstrated the best combination of high median performance and high stability with a performance index score of 97 with 3% variability.
- AWS and Google Compute Engine showed the least vCPU & memory performance variability in the 24-hour testing period.
- Dimension Data displayed the highest median performance with a score of 99 but also demonstrated high variability of 13%.
- When looking at price-performance value, a difference of up to 5.6x emerged among the IaaS providers.
- OVH achieved the highest CloudSpecs™ Score in the ranking for 2017, indicating the best price-performance value in the study. This is due to strong VM performance and the most inexpensive packaged pricing found in the study for the majority of VM sizes.
- Other CSPs such as 1&1, Rackspace, Google Compute Engine and DigitalOcean rank in the top half of the Top 10 CSPs due to a combination of moderate performance and competitive monthly pricing.
- For the price-performance of vCPU & memory, OVH maintained the highest CloudSpecs™ score.
- Regarding block storage price-performance, Rackspace received the highest CloudSpecs™ Score.
The graph below demonstrates the large variations in block storage performance and is illustrated using percentile scores retrieved from all 1,194,690 data points collected. The information has been integrated into percentile graphs designed to visualize the drastic performance variation captured while testing over time.
Performance of the Top 10 European Cloud Service Providers
A lack of transparency in the public cloud IaaS marketplace for performance often leads to misinformation or false assumptions.
Users may be led to view cloud computing as a commodity, differentiated mostly by services. The reality of performance in cloud computing is that it impacts the users differently from one CSP to the next, involving everything from the physical hardware (e.g., Intel or AMD, SSD or spinning disk), to the cost of the virtualized resources. By identifying the environments based on performance rather than resource count, users are able to maximize the value in the cloud.
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