http://www.networkworld.com/article/2866950/cloud-computing/which-cloud-providers-had-the-best-uptime-last-year.html By Brandon Butler Network World Jan 12, 2015 Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform recorded impressive statistics for how reliable their public IaaS clouds were in 2014, with both providers approaching what some consider the Holy Grail of availability: five nines. Flash back just to 2012 and pundits bemoaned the cloud being plagued with outages – from one that brought down Reddit and many other sites to the Christmas eve fiasco that impacted Netflix. It was a different story last year. Website tracking firm CloudHarmony monitors how often more than four dozen cloud providers experience downtime. The company has a web server running in each of these vendors’ clouds and tracks when the service is unavailable, logging both the number and length of outages. The science is not perfect but it gives a good idea of how providers are doing. And overall, vendors are doing well and getting better. Amazon and Google shone in particular. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) recorded 2.41 hours of downtime across 20 outages in 2014, meaning it was up and running 99.9974% of the time. Given AWS’s scale – Gartner predicted last year that Amazon had a distributed system that’s five times larger than its competitors – those are impressive figures. […]