An independent organization just ranked Google as the best cloud, beating Amazon
So says a cloud benchmark of top US clouds developed by French IT business news site JDN, based on a similar benchmark of clouds in France.
JDN banded together with two companies that test cloud performance, CloudScreener and Cedexis, to determine the best clouds.
They looked at Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, IBM SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure, and Rackspace.
Cloudscreener tested the clouds for performance, prices and level of service. Cedexis tested for network performance. All told, they came up with four rankings: a price ranking, a performance ranking, a service level ranking (a way to measure reliability), and an overall ranking.
Google won the overall ranking with a score of 85 out of a 100. Amazon came in second with 75 and IBM was third at 72. (They're not listed on the chart, but Microsoft Azure landed in No. 4, with 63 and Rackspace in last with 62.)
Google's victory is largely because it won the price war, coming in as less expensive than the others for the same type of cloud configuration.
The index tested three common types of cloud services companies buy: a large Windows machine, a large Linux machine, and a combination of machines (a "cluster").
Rackspace won as the best performing cloud. And Amazon won the "Service Level" rankings which looked at things like having data centers in different regions and certifications that prove the cloud is secure.
While this is just one attempt to compare and rank clouds, it's a good sign for Google, because most enterprises will do their own kinds of testing before picking them.
Right now, Amazon is the big cloud leader. But the market is young and Google intends to be a player.
"Every business in the world is going to run on cloud eventually," Google CEO Sundar Pichai said a few months ago on a post earnings call. "There's great buzz at Google around this area, and we continue to heavily ramp up investment here."