A few months ago, the folks at Webmetrics asked us if we’d like to work with them on some industry research (more on this below.)

Today, we’re publishing that research. It’s an extensive study of cloud performance, involving hundreds of tests from many locations across Amazon, Google, Salesforce, Rackspace, and Terremark. We built and deployed custom test agents on each cloud, and crunched hundreds of megabytes of log data. The report measures service response, network performance, CPU, and internal I/O.

Here’s a quick summary of the results; you can download the full study — complete with detailed conclusions, test methodology, and even agent code –for free from Webmetrics.

At Bitcurrent, we try to remain nonpartisan. We want to contribute to the industry’s growth and understanding. So we were thrilled at Webmetrics/Neustar’s approach here: they financed the research into cloud performance, and let us use their monitoring tool to collect the data from our agents. They were supportive, and enthusiastic, but exercised no editorial control whatsoever over the content of the report. This kind of altruistic, good-for-the-market contribution is, in our opinion, the best kind of marketing, and we commend them for adopting it.