The battle to lead in cloud computing narrows down to two key players of the internet named Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Both have made massive investments in their services and get profits of billions.
“95% of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Azure while AWS (Amazon Web Services) has a hold on 62% of the market. As a result, AWS revenue got increased by times of Azure´s revenue.”
Microsoft Azure, formerly called Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform is the top vendor in the launched in 2010. Today it is available to 140+ countries across 54 regions, provides hundreds of services and best end-to-end tools.
AWS launched in 2006; today spans 19 geographical regions around the world. It is an evolving and comprehensive cloud computing platform provided by Amazon.
While Microsoft offers Platform As a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure As a Service (IaaS), and Software As a Service (SsaS), Amazon also provides all three major categories of Cloud computing.
However, Microsoft Azure greatly deals with PaaS and SaaS. But, AWS IaaS services are divided into five different categories Storage, Database, Computes, Networking, and Content Delivery.
According to Synergy Research Group, AWS is leading the public cloud infrastructure with 34% market share whereas Microsoft is at 14% market share, IBM Cloud at 7% and Google Cloud at 6% market share.
“Thus, AWS stands out to be the first company offering pay-as-you-go cloud computing service model.”
AWS vs. Azure: Basic Highlights
Both companies offer similar services, such as microservices, DevOps, Big Data, and databases. So let’s first check basic things about both AWS vs Azure:
AWS Basics
Amazon’s AWS Infrastructure-as-a-Service has services in four different classes:
- Content storage and delivery
- Compute
- Networking
- Database
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are the core platforms on which everything is built. Amazon’s a multitude of security and identity services as the priority is the cloud. This includes:
- AWS Config track resource inventory and changes
- AWS Certificate manager manage SSL/TLS certificates
- Amazon CloudWatch for infrastructure resource usage monitoring
- AWS CloudHSM for crucial hardware-based storage and management
- AWS Cloudtrail track user activity and API usage
Azure Basics
Azure also offers its services in four classes but with a slight variation:
- Data management/databases
- Compute
- Networking
Security and management are done via Microsoft’s Active Directory built on the mature Active Directory services introduced into Windows Server 2000. Few features of Azure directory are as follows:
- Active Directory Federation Services
- Azure Active Directory
- Multi-Factor Auth
- Role Based Access for cloud-based security
Key Differences: Azure vs AWS
Both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services are popular choices, but being a competitor to each other, the only one can be the best. Thus, let us discuss a few of the significant differences between Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
- Amazon Web Services are behind to Microsoft Azure in the hybrid deployment of a cloud. Taking advantage of this, Azure allows hosting applications on the local servers as well as Cloud.
- Microsoft Azure has a virtual network, but AWS has a virtual private cloud.
- AWS let the client choose and build the cloud services as per their need while Microsoft Azure doesn’t allow it. User must use Azure simply as Microsoft designs it.
- Aure doesn’t support much open source tools, while AWS supports a large number of open source tools.
- AWS apt and aligns with Linux and other open source projects while the Azure doesn’t align with open source apps.
- Microsoft Azure Big Data platform is less mature as compared to AWS Big Data.
- AWS admin controls operate core features like Compute, Databases, Storage, Networking and Content development while Azure build Infrastructure, Manage to identify and access, Gain Insights from data, and Develop modern applications by covering core features like Compute, Storage, Database, Content development, and Networking.
- Azure supports the following operating systems – RHEL, Windows, OpenSUSE, SLSE, CoreOS, CentOS, Cloud Linux, Oracle Linux, and Ubuntu. But, AWS supports more operating systems.
- Amazon Web Services provide Big Data framework like Elastic MapReduce on their cloud platform, but Azure provides Big Data framework like HDInsight on their cloud platform.
- Azure provides real-time data analytics and processing over its Cloud platform while AWS provides real-time analytics with stream processing on its Cloud platform.
- Azure supports Redis Cache while AWS supports Elastic cache.
- Amazon Web Services are very much flexible with VM, apps development, and database on their platform, and Azure Platform is considered the same. It means both are secure, flexible, and good to use.
- Azure is slightly more pronounced and majorly focus on data management when compared to Amazon Web Services.
AWS and Azure both offer free trails to you, use each of them, and choose one of them.
“In 2018, Azure was growing at 98% a year ago while the AWS has shown growth over 50%. Amazon Web Services – AWS sales have grown to $7.7 billion while Azure sales have grown to $9.6 billion.”
Azure vs AWS: Some Other Difference
Below are a few more differences that can clearly put us in a situation to choose one. These differences are as follows;
PLATFORM TYPE: Azure is a Public Cloud platform for Microsoft and AWS is on-demand Cloud computing platform.
PRICING: In Azure, a user had to pay per minute for infrastructure while in AWS, you pay per hour for infrastructure.
HADOOP: Microsoft Azure use HDInsight while Amazon Web Services use Elastic Map Reduce.
DATA WAREHOUSE: Azure supports SQL data warehouse while AWS supports Redshift.
SECURITY FEATURES: Azure provides security by enabling permissions on the whole account. But, AWS is more secured as it offers exceptional permission controls.
OBJECT SIZE LIMIT in Azure is 4.75 TB while in AWS it is 5 TB.
TIME SPENT IN MARKET: Azure is 8 years old while AWS is 18 years.
MARKET CAPTURE: Azure has 20% of Cloud market while AWS has 62%.
MAXIMUM MEMORY: Azure’s memory in VM is 3800GB while AWS has a memory of 3904 GB.
Azure vs Amazon Web Services: Which Is Best?
We generate a vast volume of data, and most of it is stored on the cloud. With the exponential demand of Cloud in the market for data handling, public cloud vendors are in high applications.
Today, 62 % of market share is captured by AWS while 20% is by Azure. At the times where data collection is essential and required, Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure proved themselves as a game changer in cloud services.
You can choose one of them based on your project requirements. However, to let you make an easy decision, follow this guideline;
“Amazon AWS offers the best cloud services, but if you want a hybrid approach, then Microsoft Azure is best.”
Let us know in the comment section below which of them you chose for your project.