What is the Difference Between Microsoft Azure vs Amazon AWS?

What is Azure? 

• Azure is viewed as both a Platform as a Service (PaaS) and an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering. 
• Azure is a uniquely powerful offering because of its builder. Few companies have a level of infrastructure support equal to Microsoft.

What is AWS?

• AWS, like Amazon itself, has a vast toolset that's growing at an exponential rate. 
• It's been in the cloud computing market for more than 10 years, which means that AWS is the frontrunner and has been for some time. 
• AWS offering services are categorised as Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Software as a Service (Saas).

Microsoft Azure vs Amazon AWS

On the surface, Azure and AWS are pretty similar systems. They're designed to cover many of the same areas and offer comparable functionality to solve the same set of problems. 

AWS has four categories of services under IaaS: 

1. Compute
2. Content delivery and storage
3. Database
4. Networking

Azure also has four class offerings: 

1. Compute
2. Performance
3. Data management and databases
4. Networking

But when you get down to it, which is the better option for your business's money? That depends on what you're looking for in a system. 

Here's a side-by-side comparison of what you get from Azure and AWS. 

Features and Services

Let's start with the basics. 

In terms of basic capabilities, AWS and Azure are pretty similar. They share all of the common elements of public cloud services: self-service, security, instant provisioning, auto-scaling, compliance, and identity management. 

However, between the two, AWS offers the greatest depth, with 140 services across computing, database, analytics, storage, mobile, and developer tools. Keep in mind, however, that they have a head start on everyone else since they've been around the longest. 

That said, Azure is also strong on the features and services front and has a parent company that has the resources to hold their own against Amazon. 

Computing Power

One front for comparison is computing power, which is a standard requirement for any IT team. If you're going to invest in cloud services, you need cloud services with enough horsepower to keep up with your office's demands on a day-to-day basis (and during high-traffic periods). 

The primary issue here is scalability. AWS uses elastic cloud computing (EC2), which is when the available resource footprint can grow or shrink on demand using cloud computing, with a local cluster providing only part of the resource pool available to all jobs. 

AWS EC2 users can configure their own virtual machines (VMs), choose pre-configured machine images (MIs), or customize MIs. Users have the freedom to choose the size, power, memory capacity, and number of VMs they wish to use. 

Azure users, on the other hand, chose a virtual hard disk (VHD) to create a VM. This can be pre-configured by Microsoft, the user, or a separate third party. It relies on virtual scale sets for scalability purposes. 

The key difference is that EC2 can be tailored to a range of options, while Azure VMs pair with other tools to help deploy applications on the cloud. 

Storage

Successful cloud deployment relies on sufficient storage to get the job done. Fortunately, this is an area where Azure and AWS are equally strong. 

AWS's storage relies on machine instances, which are virtual machines hosted on AWS infrastructure. Storage is tied to individual instances--temporary storage is allocated once per instance and destroyed when an instance is terminated. You can also get block storage attached to an instance, similar to a hard drive. 

If you want object storage, you can get it through S3, and if you want data archiving, you can get it through Glacier. 

Azure, on the other hand, offers temporary storage through D drive and block storage through Page Blobs for VMs, with Block Blobs and Files doubling as object storage. Like AWS, it supports relational databases, Big Data, and NoSQL through Azure Table and HDInsight. 

Azure offers two classes of storage: Hot and Cool. Cool storage is less expensive, but you'll incur additional read and write costs. For AWS, there's S3 Standard and S3 Standard-Infrequent Access. 

Both have unlimited allowed objects, but AWS has an object size limit of 5 TB, while Azure has a size limit of 4.75 TB. 

Databases

Regardless of whether you need a relational database or a NoSQL offering, both AWS and Azure have robust database offerings. 

Amazon's relational database service (RDS) supports six popular database engines: 

1. Amazon Aurora
2. MariaDB
3. Microsoft SQL
4. MySQL
5. Oracle
6. PostgreSQL

Azure's SQL database, on the other hand, is based solely on Microsoft SQL. 

Both systems work perfectly with NoSQL and relational databases. They're highly available, durable, and offer easy, automatic replication. 

AWS has more instance types you can provision, but Azure's interface and tooling are delightfully user-friendly, making it easy to perform various database operations. 

Network and Content Delivery

One of the major concerns for many cloud users is finding a network that's isolated and secure. It's more than a privacy issue--it's a security issue. After all, your company has several valuable secrets that your competitors (and hackers) would love to access. 

And that means that network performance is critical in a cloud solution. AWS and Azure both have their own spin on creating isolated networks. 

AWS uses a virtual private cloud (VPC) so that users can create isolated private networks within the cloud. From there, it uses API gateways for cross-premises connectivity. To ensure smooth operation, it uses elastic load balancing during networking. 

Within a VPC, users have plenty of options available. You can create subnets, private IP ranges, route tables, and network gateways. 

Azure has a slightly different approach. 

Instead of a VPC, Azure uses a virtual network that grants users the ability to create isolated networks, as well as subnets, private IP ranges, route tables, and network gateways. 

If you want cross-network connectivity, you'll use a VPN gateway. Load balancing is handled with a load balancer and application gateway. 

Both AWS and Azure offer firewall options and solutions to extend your on-premises data center into the cloud without compromising your data.