Windows Azure beats Amazon EC2, Google App Engine in cloud speed test
Microsoft's Windows Azure has beaten all competitors in a year's worth of cloud speed tests, coming out ahead of Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Rackspace and a dozen others. — The independent tests were conducted …
Context & Ripple Effects
The arc here runs back to 2008, when Microsoft's own Windows Server was being run on Amazon EC2 — the company renting capacity from the rival it now beats. Three years into Windows Azure's life, an independent year-long test series ranks it ahead of Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Rackspace and roughly a dozen other providers on raw speed.
The result lands during a bruising stretch for Microsoft: the Zune hardware line was confirmed dead earlier the same week and the board's proxy filing defended Steve Ballmer's compensation, so a credible third-party win in the fastest-growing infrastructure category gives the company a counter-narrative at a moment when it has few.
First-order effects
- Microsoft gains a defensible marketing claim for Azure sales pitches against EC2 and App Engine, where performance — not just price or features — can now be cited from independent data.
- Buyers evaluating cloud platforms get their first year-long comparative dataset, making speed a concrete line item in procurement decisions that previously leaned on vendor self-benchmarks.
Second-order effects
- Amazon, Google and Rackspace are pushed to contest the methodology or commission competing measurements, since conceding the performance frame hands Microsoft a wedge into workloads sensitive to latency and throughput.
- Rackspace, positioned as the open-source alternative to the big three, faces pressure to differentiate on something other than speed after finishing behind all of them.
Third-order effects
- If benchmark-driven comparison becomes standard in cloud buying, infrastructure shifts toward a commodity market where measurable performance and price, rather than platform lock-in alone, decide share — raising the stakes for whoever publishes the reference numbers.
The trend: Cloud infrastructure is entering a phase where independent performance measurement, not first-mover scale, becomes the basis on which challengers like Microsoft attack Amazon's lead.