Differences Between AWS and AZURE
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud service platform from Amazon, which provides services in different domains such as compute, storage, delivery and other functionality which help the business to scale and grow. We can utilize these domains in the form of services, which can be used to create and deploy different types of applications in the cloud platform. Microsoft Azure is a cloud service platform by Microsoft, which provides services in different domains such as compute, storage, database, networking, developer tools and other functionality which help organizations to scale and grow their businesses. Azure services are broadly categorized as the platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) which can be used by developers and software employees to create, deploy and manage services and applications through the cloud.
What is AWS?
AWS services are designed in such a way that they work with each other and produce a scalable and efficient outcome. AWS offering services are categorized into 3 types such as Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). AWS was launched in 2006 and become the best cloud platform among currently available cloud platforms. Cloud platforms offer various advantages such as management overhead reduction, cost minimization, etc.
What is AZURE?
Microsoft Azure was launched in 2010 and it emerges as one of the biggest commercial cloud service providers. It offers a wide range of integrated cloud services and functionalities such as analytics, computing, networking, database, storage, mobile and web applications that seamlessly integrate with your environment in order to achieve efficiency and scalability.
Head to Head Comparison Between AWS and AZURE (Infographics)
Below Is The Top 6 Comparison Between AWS vs AZURE
Key Differences Between AWS and Azure
Both are popular choices in the market; let us discuss some of the major differences:
- AWS EC2 users can configure their own VMS or pre-configured images whereas Azure users need to choose the virtual hard disk to create a VM which is pre-configured by the third party and need to specify the number of cores and memory required.
- AWS offers temporary storage which will be assigned when an instance is started and destroyed when it is terminated and S3 for object storage. Whereas Azure offers temporary storage by block storage through page Blobs for VM’s and Block Blobs for object storage.
- AWS offers Virtual private cloud so that user can create isolated networks within the cloud Whereas Azure offers Virtual network through which we can create isolated networks, subnets, route tables, private IP address range as same as in AWS.
- Azure is open to Hybrid cloud systems whereas AWS is less open to private or third-party cloud providers.
- AWS follows pay as you go and they charge per hour whereas Azure also follows pay as you go model and they charge per minute which provides more exact pricing model than AWS.
- AWS has more features and configurations and it offers a lot of flexibility, power, and customization with support for many third party tools integration. Whereas Azure will be easy to use if we are familiar with windows as it is a windows platform and it’s easy to integrate on-premises windows servers with cloud instances to create a hybrid environment.
AWS vs AZURE Comparison Table
Below are the lists of points, Describe the Comparison:
| The basis of comparison | AWS | AZURE |
| Compute | We have computers to perform the calculation, processing, and computing of data and we can scale to thousands of processing nodes with help of cloud service providers based on our requirement. AWS uses Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as a primary solution for scalable computing and for management of software container with Docker or Kubernetes it uses ECS (EC2 Container service) and uses EC2 container registry. | For computing purpose Azure uses virtual machines and to scale for large extent uses virtual machine scale sets and for software management, in Docker container it uses Container Service (AKS) and uses Container Registry for Docker container registry. |
| Storage | Storage is next to the main service for the cloud provider. AWS uses S3 (Simple storage service) which is longest running than Azure and it provides lots of documentation and tutorials. It offers Archive storage by a Glacier, data archive and S3 Infrequent access (IA) | Azure uses Storage Block blob for storage which are comprised of blocks and uploads large blobs efficiently. It uses Storage cool and storage archive for archiving data. |
| Networking | Cloud providers offer different partners and networks which will interconnect with data centers using different products. AWS uses a virtual private cloud for networking and uses an API gateway for cross-premises connectivity. AWS uses Elastic load balancing for load balance during networking. | Azure uses a virtual network for networking or content delivery and uses a VPN gateway for cross-premises connectivity. For load balancing during content delivery, it manages with load balancer and application gateway |
| Deploying Apps | AWS also offers similar solutions with Elastic Beanstalk, Batch, Lambda, container service etc. But it doesn’t have many features on app hosting side. | One of the advantages with cloud providers is a simple process of deploying an application. As a developer, we want to deploy our app on multiple servers virtually by using PaaS features. Azure has multiple app deployment tools such as cloud services, container service, functions, batch, app services etc. |
| Database | Almost all cloud providers provide an ability to implement a database in both SQL and NoSQL solutions. AWS uses a relational database as a service by using RDS, for NoSQL it uses Dynamo DB and caching it uses Elastic Cache. | Azure uses SQL database, MySQL, and PostgreSQL for the relational database, it uses Cosmos DB for NoSQL solutions and Redis Cache for caching purpose. |
| Open source Developers | AWS is excellent for open source developers as it welcomes Linux users and offers several integrations for different open source applications. | Azure provides the facility for enterprise users so that they can use current active directory account to sign on the Azure cloud platform and runs .net framework on Windows, Linux, and MacOS. |
Conclusion
Finally, it’s an overview of the Differences Between AWS vs AZURE cloud providers. I hope you will have a better understanding of the services offered by these AWS vs AZURE providers and choose a cloud provider based on your requirements. If you are looking for Infrastructure as a service or wide range of service and tools then you can choose AWS. If you are looking for windows integration or a good platform as a service (PaaS) cloud provider then you can choose Azure.
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