Azure vs. Amazon Web Services (AWS): A Point-by-point Comparison

1. What is Azure?

Azure is a public cloud computing service provider developed and run by Microsoft. It builds, tests, manages, and deploys applications through Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS).

The platform was announced in 2008 and released on the 1st of October 2010. Since then, the service providers have reached 54 geographical regions and 162 availability zones, establishing themselves as the most successful service providers in the current market.

2. What is AWS or Amazon Web Services?

AWS or Amazon Web Services, an Amazon branch, is a cloud computing service provider that offers enterprises, individuals, and government services. The products and services include computing, storage, database, networking, analytics, application services and deployment, management, mobile, developer tools, and Internet of Things (IoT).

Since its inception in 2002, Amazon is now one of the leading cloud computing service providers in the market. It offers services in 22 geographical regions, with each area having multiple availability zones.

3. Azure vs. AWS

Azure was released eight years after the introduction of AWS. Though Azure was late to the market, it quickly rose to be one of the most successful platforms thanks to its pre-installed business base. It competes directly with AWS by providing services in the same domain as AWS and has seen a 98% growth in revenues.

Though Azure has had phenomenal growth in the market, it cannot compare to the sheer expanse and size of AWS's services. It offers 175 services across compute, storage, networking, and other benefits mentioned earlier. The popularity AWS enjoys partly due to its developer-friendly services and being the first to market. It has also done an excellent job by translating its scale into economic benefits for its customers.

a. Storage Services

AWS storage services include S3, EFS, EBS, Import/Export data through CloudFront, Amazon Glacier for Archived storage, and Amazon Gateway for Hybrid solutions. The storage is temporary; i.e., it is allocated when an instance is created and destroyed once the model is terminated. On termination, it provides block storage and can be attached to EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) or kept separate.

Azure's storage services- Azure Storage Service, Blob Storage, Table, Queue and file storage, site recovery, Import/Export, and Azure Backup, rival AWS's offerings. The storage is temporary, but unlike AWS, it is offered through the D drive.

The number of allowed objects is unlimited in both, but Azure has an object limit of 4.75TB, Azure has a limit of 5TB.

b. Hybrid Solutions

Microsoft’s Azure Stack has been the go-to option for most enterprises. It includes providing hardware and software for deploying Azure cloud services from a local data center with a shared management portal, APIs, and code for simple operability.

AWS introduced hybrid solutions in 2018 at its re: invent conference. It introduced Snowball Edge and added a hybrid element by collaborating with VMware. AWS has always maintained a stance of "pure public cloud or nothing" and is still developing a hybrid solution that can compete with Azure.

c. Pricing

AWS and Azure offer a pay-to-go model. While the former charges by the hour, the latter charges by the minute, making Azure’s pricing model more accurate.

AWS offers three models, on-demand: pay for what you use, reserved: reserve an instance for 1 to 3 years, and spot: bid for extra capacity. Azure offers options between prepaid and monthly subscriptions.

Both services show excellent capabilities, and picking a winner is difficult. If you need great Hybrid Solutions to integrate with pre-existing Microsoft services, then Azure is your answer. And if you're looking for a broader range of services with more flexibility and ease of use, then AWS is your answer. So ultimately, it boils down to your business needs and requirements.

Other useful articles: