Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) Azure has been crowned as the fastest performing cloud service in the world, according to CloudSleuth. Various tests to simulate users were conducted at 15-minute intervals and from 30 nodes across the globe; the final rankings were determined from 12 months of data.

According to CloudSleuth, Google's App Engine is ranked in second place, while Virginia-based GoGrid, NTT's OpSource and Rackspace are in third, fourth and fifth place respectively. Amazon's EC2 came in sixth.

It can be argued that the network locations of the 30 test nodes are arbitrary in nature and may have resulted in some cloud providers being penalized while others benefited. CloudSleuth told InformationWeek that the nodes were selected to "reflect where Internet traffic originates." While an interesting read, I would strongly urge against taking the results of the report at face value, since the results may well reflect skewed figures and may be irrelevant for a business targeting users at locations with fewer Internet users, for example.

In the meantime, you can get the last 30 days of results for free from CloudSleuth's website.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at InformationWeek
- check out this article at Ars Technica
- check out this article at iTnews

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