Considered to be the leaders in the public cloud service provider, AWS and Azure each offer different businesses, a broad and profound set of capabilities throughout the global arena. However, different organizations choose to deploy both the platforms together for greater flexibility and sustainability. Consulting companies and several software vendors might also build on and deploy both AWS and Azure, as these platforms represent the maximum of the cloud market demand.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure, released as Windows Azure in 2010, was renamed Microsoft Azure in 2014 and is the Microsoft´s public cloud computing platform providing a range of cloud services. It not only excels at integrating various services, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) but also provides other range of cloud services, including storage and networking, analytics storage, hybrid integration, Internet of things (IoT) and Management and Security. These services can be picked up and further opted to design, develop and scale new applications or even run already existing applications in the public cloud. Moreover, Microsoft sets up the stage for Azure to be the integrated cloud platform for its other services like Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Office 365, Bing, OneDrive, Xbox Live, and Skype. Moreover, Microsoft Azure is generally available in 40 regions across the world, having Europe, America, Asia-Pacific, and Africa as the major geo locations to enable higher performance.
The versatility of Azure can be reflected with the fact that Azure supports different operating systems, frameworks and programming languages. Net based applications can be integrated and worked upon with Android, Windows and iOS devices.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
In 2006 Amazon Web Services started offering cloud-based IT Infrastructure services to businesses in the form of online services for websites and client-side applications which gave them the opportunity to replace the capital infrastructure expenses along with low variable costs. AWS offers a diverse set of services which includes CloudDrive, DynamoDatabase, CloudSearch, Simple Storage Services (S3), ElasticCache and a lot more. AWS offerings are billed as per their usage and their rates vary from service to service.To further promote the robustness of the system and minimize the impact of the outage, AWS is diversified into 12 several geographically AWS regions. These regions have central data centers in the Western USA, Eastern USA, Brazil, Australia, Japan, Singapore and Europe. Every AWS region comprises of multiple small geographical areas known as Availability Zones.
However, at a quick glance, Azure and AWS might seem quite similar on paper, but there are some key differentiating points among them which completely make their choice uncertain and requirement based.
AWS and Azure Comparison
Cost
The cost of both the cloud platforms varies depending upon the performance, capacity, data transfer need and whether an advanced feature like auto-scaling and load balancing. The frequency of cloud instances plays a very vital role in pricing factors of Azure and AWS. Microsoft charges for the usage by rounding up to the nearest minute whereas Amazon rounds up to the closest hour. For instance, AWS m4.large is $0.14/hr versus Azure D2 at $0.17/hour. The m4.xlarge is $0.279/hr versus Azure D3 at $0.34/hr. Clearly, Azure is about 10% more expensive for similar compute instances. How to minimize AWS data transfer costs.
Service Reliability and Uptime
Azure and AWS equally account for greater than 99.9% service availability, both the providers give credit back to their respective customers if the Uptime falls or drops below a threshold figure. On the other hand, both the service providers have experienced periodic outages affecting their services like Office 365, Netflix and more. To increase AWS availability, Datapath.io can be used for network optimization and maximizing uptime.
Setup and Customer friendliness
Microsoft Azure is quite friendly to Windows admins, as they don’t have to work and learn some new platform, also making the Windows server integration and the hybrid cloud environment creation an easy play. Azure instances work flawlessly with Microsoft cloud services like Azure SQL Database and Azure Active Directory.
Technical Support
Azure and AWS both offer several levels of tech support which depend upon how urgently the issue needs to be resolved, also, in case, a dedicated account manager or tech support for integrations with the third party if something goes unplanned. However, Azure supported plans are billed on a flat monthly fee basis, whereas, Amazon fees vary on a sliding scale to a monthly usage basis, also support cost can be raised further depending upon high usage.
Conclusion
The decision for selecting the Cloud service provider comes down to our needs and expectations. Perhaps, the most suitable way to choose is to start a free trial with both the service providers and experience what each platform looks and feel like.
