Your organization may be leveraging cloud-based services for cost savings, pay-as you-go, or because of the built-in security or data resilience. Or at least that’s the data suggesting. Today, up to 82% of workloads are hosted in the cloud and 67% of enterprise infrastructure is cloud-based.
As businesses consider moving to the public cloud, one question continues to be asked by cloud enthusiasts, business leaders, and engineers: Which cloud is better, Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure? There are many factors that will impact your decision on which cloud is best for you.
We’ll be comparing the similarities and differences between Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, and hopefully you will leave with a better understanding of which cloud — Microsoft Azure, or Amazon AWS — is best for your business.
An Overview of Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure
Amazon AWS is the market leader for public cloud services, with 33% of global market share. Microsoft Azure currently holds 13%. Both Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure offer similar cloud-centric features, including subscription pricing, consumption-based pricing, native security features, autoscaling and identity access management, high availability and inexpensive object-based storage, as well as instant provisioning.
Both Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure are aligned on the majority of services. For casual cloud practitioners, either Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS can be a great match. In the following sections we will examine some of the differences between these cloud offerings. Let’s start by looking at some of the similar features and services offered by Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.
What are the Computing Differences in AWS & Azure?
Computing capabilities are at the top of every IT department’s priority list. Computing capabilities can make or break a business’s ability to perform highly transactional and computationally-intensive processes.
AWS deployments will rely on virtual machine instances within AWS, also known as elastic cloud computing (EC2 instances) or elastic cloud computing. AWS allows users to create their own virtual machines and have the freedom to select the size, power, and other resources.
To create a virtual machine, users can use Microsoft Azure to create a virtual disk (or (VHD). After creating a virtual machine, users can scale it accordingly. The main take-home is that EC2 users can customize their virtual machines based upon resources, while Microsoft Azure users rely only on a base function VM which integrates with Microsoft Azure services.
AWS and Azure Network and Content Delivery
Cloud-based networking is used to keep cloud environments private and secure, and also allow communication between multiple locations.
Amazon AWS addresses this issue by providing a virtual private network (VPC) that users can use to isolate their AWS environment. APIs can then be used to enable communication between VPCs and between AWS environments and on-premises networks.
Microsoft Azure approaches cloud networking in a slightly different way. Microsoft Azure is not a VPC like AWS. Instead, it offers users a private network in which they can configure the subnet, IPs and DNS just like an on-premises IT environment.
Azure offers vNet instead of a VPC. This virtual network allows users to create isolated networks as well as subnets and private IP ranges. Route tables can also be created.