AWS vs Azure: Which Cloud Platform Should You Choose?

Quick Summary: AWS and Microsoft Azure are leading cloud providers offering similar core features and cloud capabilities. However, they differ from each other in some essential aspects. That’s what we are going to learn in this article – Azure vs AWS, differences, along with the advantages and disadvantages of AWS and Azure, helping you choose the right cloud service.

Many, many years ago, far away from technology and the internet...

Okay, let’s stop right there! As of now, it’s actually happening, and we’re far from anything but the internet at any given moment of our daily life. The smartphone within your hand’s reach so perfectly proves it.

And in every situation, it’s aptly clear that there’s a battle of sorts going on between the tech giants for cloud mastery. Today, we have the Big Two of cloud computing for business – AWS vs Azure.

In this cloud war, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are superheroes in their own power – touching millions of lives and making the world a better place. But who is the ultimate winner? A surface-level look might make you think AWS is on the top of the cloud, but the decision isn't that simple. There are multiple factors to consider like availability, price, storage, etc. While talking about interface, AWS has more instances and better provisioning, whereas Azure has a smoother and easy-to-use interface.

So, let's find the answer by discovering the winner of this two-way horse race for cloud dominance - AWS or Azure?

AWS vs Azure: Why is This So Important?

It's completely reasonable to wonder what this fuss is all about and which tech giant dominates the cloud computing industry. You may ask – is the reward really worth it?

Yes, it is. As per the 2022 State of the Cloud Report, public cloud is the top priority for 38% of surveyed organizations, a significant rise from 29% in 2017. Businesses are increasingly opting for a cloud-based environment for the reliability and cost-effective benefits it provides. So, whichever provider leads the market will get the lion's share of consumers and dominate the rest of the pack.

And as it turns out, AWS and Azure combined have control over 50% of cloud services in the whole world. This is an intense competition that will only grow in time as both corporations are aiming at getting a strong foothold in the industry through innovation and investments.

Hence, not just the community but several organizations seek to compare them before shifting to a cloud infrastructure. When hasty decisions, missteps, and roadblocks might cost you valuable resources, it totally makes sense to crack the AWS Azure comparison before you make the big move.

Key Difference Between AWS and Azure

Azure and AWS are both well-recognized cloud lords who are combatting for a large piece of the cloud cake and revolutionizing the IT domain at the same time. Currently, of all installed application workloads, AWS stands at 41.5%, while Azure holds around 29.4. Google, we must mention, is another competitor in this race, having a 3% share and giving a boost to the AWS vs Azure vs GCP debate.

However, Microsoft’s revenue is often higher and doubles the growth rate of AWS. Deciding which is better AWS or Azure is no easy task.

Talking about AWS vs Azure, AWS has a product marketplace for Linux and Windows with a huge partner network, whereas Azure is expanding its ecosystem digitally despite the few Linux alternatives.

But here’s what we can do. Let’s take a deeper look into their features and services to determine the better one for your business.

TL;DR

If you are running out of time to understand the difference between AWS vs Azure, don’t worry, we will share some highlights for you – Azure vs AWS.

• Talking about AWS vs Azure, AWS offers a wide range of services with over 200 offerings, including compute, storage, database, machine learning, and IoT, while Azure offers strong integration with Microsoft products and services, including AI, analytics, DevOps, and more.
• Microsoft Azure is spreading its spectrum to open-source developers, whereas AWS supports Linux and has connectors for open-source apps, which is ideal for open-source applications software.
• AWS allows users to establish safe, private networks in the cloud with Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), whereas Azure makes use of virtual networks instead of VPCs. A VPN gateway that makes it possible for data to flow between various networks.
• Considering Azure vs AWS, AWS security is offered using defined roles with permission management features, whereas Azure security offers permission on the entire account.
• In AWS vs Azure, AWS servers can be accessed separately, whereas Azure machines are organized into cloud services and respond to the same domain name with different ports.
• Talking about the difference between AWS vs Azure, Azure provides a virtual network via which we can establish isolated networks, subnets, route tables, and private IP address ranges, whereas AWS offers a virtual private cloud through which users can create separated networks within the cloud.
• The difference between Azure and AWS is that Azure users have to select the virtual hard disk to create a VM that is pre-configured by a third party and needs to provide the required number of cores and memory, whereas AWS EC2 users have to configure their own VMS or pre-configured images.

Let's dive into the key strengths, compare them, and get to the bottom of this AWS vs. Azure clash.

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1. AWS vs Azure: Networking

Azure and AWS cloud platforms manage a worldwide cloud infrastructure of thousands of data centers that interconnect with each other. Both are champions in terms of delivering modern networking services providing high security, easy availability, state-of-the-art performance, and global coverage.

AWS

Amazon offers its users a virtual private cloud (VPC) and ensures continuous, reliable services using an extensive framework across 210 edge locations, 77 zones, and 24 global regions. As a result, they're able to provide a lightning-fast response, fast delivery, and speedy deployment.

Azure

Microsoft provides a virtual network (VNET) to its clients with cloud network locations at 60+ global regions and 170 points of presence (PoP). They usually try to keep their traffic under the Azure network and hence are able to offer secure, flexible, and fast services.

2. AWS vs Azure: Storage

Extended storage capabilities are one of the greatest reasons companies are embracing cloud migrations and its impact on business. Between Microsoft Azure vs AWS, both offer various storage options and the trick is figuring out which one suits your organization’s storage needs.

AWS

AWS has its industry-standard Simple Storage Service (S3) or large block storage that you can use for object delivery and storage. Whenever you start an instance, it automatically allocates the needed storage, and when the instance gets terminated, the storage space will be destroyed. AWS also supports Big Data, NoSQL, and relational databases.

Azure

Between AWS and Azure, Azure supports additional backup for retrieval and archival options, site recovery, and import-export. Microsoft's cloud is the primary storage of Azure, and they designed it well to solve your existing data storage issues. Using file system services, blocks, and disk drives, Azure efficiently stores your temporary data.

3. AWS vs Azure: Computing Power

Computation resources are the bedrocks on which you’ll build your cloud environment. Choosing the right configuration will greatly impact the performance and speed of your platform, including the systems and services your people utilize.

AWS

Amazon E2C (Elastic Compute Cloud). AWS Lamda and Elastic Beanstalk are some of the premium computing services AWS provides. They're highly flexible and able to monitor and scale your cloud apps automatically. AWS also has its own container technologies like Kubernetes services. The Marketplace has various Amazon Machine Images (AMI) available to help you select an operating system. You can configure machines and define cores and memory.

Azure

When it comes to AWS vs Azure services in cloud computing, Azure is one of the top players. It supports multiple infrastructures, including virtual machines, container services, app functions, and more. There are several templates in the Azure Marketplace to select from, such as SQL Server, Firewall, Ubuntu, NextGen WebApp, SharePoint Server, Red Hat Linux, or Windows Server. You can choose the standard VM size and preferred region available in the marketplace.

4. AWS vs Azure: Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network or CDN is a distributed set of servers that can help you with efficient and fast content delivery to your users. You can temporarily store the content on the servers located in the closest local regions. Let's check out the AWS Azure comparison in CDN services.

AWS

The content delivery network for AWS is CloudFront that you can seamlessly get started with and integrate with the simple storage service. It's available at a very affordable price and hence a great option for startups.

Azure

Azure's CDN solution empowers users to deliver quick and high-bandwidth content to consumers with real-time analytics and enhanced security. It’s scalable enough to manage high loads and cache content from Azure storage blobs that are publicly available.

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5. AWS vs Azure: Database

Since databases contain varied formats and tons of data, clients generally face certain problems while accessing the data. To mitigate this, both AWS and Azure offer several database options to manage all kinds of data.

AWS

AWS utilizes relational databases for longevity and is compatible with various database engines like MariaDB, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Amazon Aurora. Moreover, it offers Elastic Cache for caching needs and DynamoDB for NoSQL.

Azure

Regarding the use of databases between AWS vs Azure, Azure uses MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL database for relation database, Redis Cache for caching needs, and Cosmos database for NoSQL services.

6. AWS vs Azure: Development Tools

Azure and AWS – each of them is a role model for innovation and creating modern software engineering tools. So, we believe the contrast lies in their offering of networking tools, serverless platforms, machine learning, and AI solutions. Here’s the breakdown:

AWS

Amazon has always been a pioneer in digital transformation with its focus on IoT and the use of AI/ML. Accordingly, AWS provides around 20 IoT, ML/AI tools, including the Lex interface that facilities the Alexa technology. It also features two completely serverless tools – AWS Fargate and Lambda. The former helps easily deploy cloud apps, while the latter is a serverless computing environment. Moreover, hiring expert AWS developers can help you to choose the best development tools as per your specified business objectives.

Azure

If you're already using Microsoft software and applications, you can seamlessly integrate Azure's Cognitive Services with them. Azure features one serverless platform called Azure Functions, and combined with Azure DevOps pipelines, it allows you to streamline and manage complex workflows. Some of the IoT and AI tools it provides are Azure Bot Service, Time Series Insights, IoT Edge, Stream Analytics, etc.

7. AWS vs Azure: Security

Security is of enormous importance when your cloud platform takes care of huge amounts of customer and business data. Between AWS vs Azure, both follow the required security measures and compliance protocols.

AWS

Since AWS is the most mature and oldest cloud platform, it has faced a wider array of issues and found solutions to them accordingly. It features data loss protection, API activity monitoring, threat intelligence through Guard Duty, isolation through granular IAM and security groups (firewall), and vulnerability assessment via AWS Inspector.

Azure

The strength of Azure lies in its central security structure that you can control from a single directory. Azure Active Directory is the one and only source for all kinds of authorization and permission management. From networking and compute storage to identity and control management, Azure lets you implement security measures at every layer of your app stack.

8. AWS vs Azure: Cost

AWS or Azure, both these platforms provide a no-cost tier with a per(h/m/s)-on-demand pricing system for all services. However, the ultimate cost can vary based on your server choice, resource use, usage time, etc.

AWS

AWS offers quite a complex pricing structure that often needs a third-party app for management. Nevertheless, it features 5 principal pricing models, such as On-Demand (pay by the hour/second as per your need), Spot Instances (a great option to reduce costs through cloud cost optimization), Reserved Instances (particularly beneficial for a long-term commitment), etc.

Azure

You can purchase the majority of Azure services under the "pay as you go" pricing model, which will charge you based on your usage. It also offers exciting discounts for Spot Instances (VMs from Azure's spare capacity, which you can terminate at brief notice) and Reserved Instances (1-3 years of association).

Last but not least, here are some other factors that can help us with the difference between AWS and Azure:

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AWS vs Azure - Which is Better for Your Organization?In comparing Azure and AWS, we have tried to answer which cloud platform is leading the pack. While AWS may look better overall, your specific organizational needs might lead you to choose Azure. So, in this cloud war, there is no clear winner or loser (yet). It's an unpredictable game of chance, and anytime a wild card can turn the boat upside down.Hence, those who ignore it will be left behind, and those who become proactive will get the reward.The remaining fact, in the end, is that both AWS and Azure are spearheaded players with the finest products and services. All you need is a competent cloud application development company to help you unlock the box of cloud opportunities so that you can actually feel you're on cloud nine.Check it out now; you still have the time to be a part of the cloud revolution!