Which one is better? AWS vs. Azure

With the advent of the heyday of cloud computing, major cloud service providers are constantly conquering cities to consolidate their dominance in this field. From the perspective of market share and usage promotion, AWS and Azure have become the leaders in this respect without any criticism. However, for users of cloud services, what bothers them most is how to choose the one that best suits their business needs from among the many cloud service providers.

In this article, we will compare these two cloud service giants in a comprehensive way to help you make better comprehensive choices.

AWS and Azure: General features

First, we compare the different characteristics of AWS and Azure from five dimensions: release year, market share, open-source status, hybrid cloud characteristics, license, and Linux ecosystem.

With the basis of the above characteristics, let's compare the pricing of the two products.

1. Pricing

As the leading cloud services provider, the pricing models of Azure and AWS follow the classic cloud computing pricing architecture, namely: pay-as-you-go. Specifically, AWS charges users by the hour, while Azure charges users by the minute. Therefore, for short-term subscription plans, Azure provides you with greater flexibility. Of course, it is worth noting that for some service applications of users, when their architecture needs to be expanded, their expenditure on the Azure platform is often more expensive than AWS.

2. Computing Services

Computing power and computing services can be described as one of the core reference indicators of cloud service provision platforms. At present, various cloud service applications generate massive amounts of data all the time and frequency. Therefore, platform users need faster processing resources provided by the cloud platform. Correspondingly, computing services can measure and ensure that users generate different instances within a few minutes and can immediately expand new cases when needed. Next, let's take a look at how AWS and Azure meet such needs.

Currently, AWS has services such as EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, AWS Lambda, and ECS. The similar services that Azure can provide include Azure Virtual Machine, App Service, Azure Functions, and Container Services. So it is obvious that the two are on par in terms of computing services.

However, when you look at the cost aspect, you will find that various instances of Azure tend to become more and more expensive as its system capacity increases. For example, if you have an example with 256GB RAM and 64-bit CPU, AWS will charge you at a rate of $3.20 per hour, while Azure will charge you at a rate of $6.76 per hour. Above we discussed and compared the computing capabilities of the two platforms, and now we will compare the data storage capabilities of the two platforms.

3. Storage Service

Both AWS and Azure can provide long-term reliable storage services. AWS has benefits such as AWS S3, EBS, and Glacier, while Azure storage service has three types: Blob storage, disk storage, and standard archive.

AWS S3 can ensure high availability and automatic replication across regions. Furthermore, when dealing with the need for temporary storage, AWS will run immediately every time an instance is started; and end the service when the sample is stopped, thereby realizing block storage similar to a hard disk. Therefore, it can be connected to any EC2 instance while maintaining its independence.

Azure provides temporary storage and page blob storage for VM volumes. As the corresponding option of AWS S3, Azure also has the chance of block storage. In addition, Azure can also provide two types of opportunities for cold storage and hot storage.

After discussing storage, let's take a look at the performance of the two service providers on database services.

4. Database Service

After "going to the cloud," many companies can provide various services through the cloud platform and thus produce data in multiple formats. Therefore, to preserve these data, the databases of each cloud platform will naturally follow up and follow up. Developing. Accordingly, both AWS and Azure can handle various structured and unstructured data types by providing different database services.

If you pay attention to the durability of the database, then AWS has Amazon RDS, and Azure has Azure SQL Server database. Specifically, Amazon RDS can support different database engines, including MariaDB, Amazon Aurora, MySQL, Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. For Azure, as the name suggests, SQL Server databases are, of course, based on SQL

5. Service interface

Let's consider their interface again. Azure has a friendly and smooth user interface, while AWS provides more optional examples. It can be seen that these two tools have their own merits.

6. Scope of service

Judging from the coverage of their services, they can all support data analysis and extensive data services. Among them, AWS has EMR, and Azure also has a similar product-HD Insights. In addition, Azure also provides Cortana Intelligence Suite with Hadoop, Spark, Storm, and HBase.

In terms of software maturity, AWS also provides a more mature environment specifically for big data.

7. Network Service

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) supports the creation of isolated networks in the cloud space. Users can create various subnets, routing tables, private IP address segments, and different gateways. As an echo of VPC, Microsoft Azure Virtual Network allows you to get all the functions of VPC ideally. And these two service providers also provide solutions for expanding the data center deployed on-premises to the cloud and configuring cloud firewall options.

8. Container and orchestration support

As mentioned earlier, AWS can provide more mature, extensive data analysis services. Its tool spectrum covers many fields, including the Internet of Things, mobile applications, and the creation of computing environments on-demand. Of course, they can also provide support for Docker. Because services such as Azure HD Insight can support Hadoop, Microsoft is slightly better in this regard. Azure on Windows Server 2016 can also provide integration with Docker for various Windows containers and Hyper-V containers. Of course, on this platform, we can run both Windows containers and Linux containers.

9. Compliance

Amazon has established good relationships with US government agencies and supports various government cloud products. At the same time, they also provide suitable security measures to ensure that individual users appropriately access the corresponding cloud space. This is essential for the company to dispose of sensitive data properly. Microsoft provides more than 50 compliant products, including the famous ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations), DISA (National Defense Information Systems Agency), HIPAA, CJIS (Criminal Justice Information) Services) and FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards). Therefore, in terms of security, the two are equally matched.

Final score

In summary, both AWS and Azure cloud platforms can provide comprehensive functions and services. It is difficult for us to say which one is stronger and more advanced arbitrarily. Azure is excellent in hybrid cloud and integration with Microsoft's full-stack products, while AWS has more flexibility and additional features. All that said, you should still depend on the specific needs of your organization.