The Cloud Computing industry is at its prime and is growing rapidly, exploding into a vast array of products, technologies, cloud providers and its services. Most of the cloud services companies are contested to claim supremacy in the cloud domain. Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS have been relentlessly the most popular and are the biggest giants in the field of cloud computing.

Both of them provide a number of benefits to the user in terms of superior compute power, pricing, scalability and its security to the unrivaled cost effectiveness. In this article, we are going to discuss the two best cloud computing giants AWS vs Azure, that will help you in figuring out which is the best to fulfill your business needs.

What is AWS and Azure

The companies are currently migrating to the cloud server and it is more often going to increase in the near future. The cloud has become a necessity for most businesses because of the remote working environment and its ending support for on-premises infrastructure. Presently, Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS are the most popular cloud computing services in the world. 

About Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure was first developed in 2008 for cloud computing services. It is generally offered through a global network of data centers which is managed by Microsoft. The services that are provided by Azure are categorized in three different ways: Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). 

About Amazon AWS

Amazon Web Services or AWS was first launched in the year of 2006. This is one of the world’s most comprehensive and broadly used cloud platforms that provides more than 200 fully featured services from a large number of data centers globally. Databases, application development, computing, security and infrastructure management are some of the services offered here.

Why Choose AWS vs Azure

Both AWS and Azure are global leaders in the cloud computing industry in their respective fields. Both of them are uniquely recognised for their databases, services, excellence and market shares. In terms of cloud frontier, they has an ideal technological foundation, expertise, and a financial resource to create an industry leading cloud platforms.

Both Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure has been named in Leaders in the Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructures and Platform Services. They are featured highest in the top right corners of Gartner’s Leader Quadrant, and has been awarded on their Excecution Ability and Completeness of Vision.

AWS vs Azure Performance

The comparison between the top cloud computing platforms i.e. Amazon AWS vs Microsoft Azure posed some challenges in terms of its performance. There are a number of comparable VMs features of Azure and AWS. The VMs or Virtual Machine helps in running the software program and operating system, stores data and other computing functions.

According to a website named Cockroach Labs, Amazon Web Services performs much better than its competitors in terms of a single core class. Moreover, Amazon AWS also shows a better performance than Microsoft Azure in the 16 core Virtual Machines class because of its quickest iterations in each second.

Databases of Amazon AWS vs Microsoft Azure

Almost every software application today needs a database to save their information. Both AWS and Azure offer database services to their clients, regardless whether they require a relational database or a NoSQL offerings. The Microsoft Azure equivalent SQL Server database and AWS Relational Database Services (RDS) are highly available and durable and offer automatic replications.

Some of the Common Features of Amazon RDS are

• Amazon AWS works more perfectly with NoSQL and relational databases offering a mature cloud environment for big .
• Core analytics of Amazon Web Services provides EMR (a managed Spark, Hadoop and Presto Solution) that assists in setting up an EC2 cluster and it integrates various Amazon AWS services.
• The Relational Database Services of Amazon support six most popular database engines which are MariaDB, MySQL, Microsoft SQL, Amazon Aurora, Oracle and PostgreSQL.
• It contains more types of instances to provide an additional control over the DB instances.

Databases Features of a Microsoft Azure in comparison to AWS may include

• Like AWS, Azure also supports NoSQL and relational databases as well as Big Data through Azure table and Azure HDInsight.
• They offer analytical products through their exclusive Cortana Intelligence Suite which comes with Spark, Storm, Hadoop and HBase.
• The database services of an Azure SQL is solely based on MS SQL server.
• The interfaces and tooling Microsoft SQL makes it easy to perform various other DB operations.

Machine Learning AWS vs Azure

Amazon Web Services works with their Sagmaker and Microsoft Azure has a machine learning studio that makes the machine learning model development faster and easier to run. Both of them offer a managed service which covers an end to end machine learning pipeline to create, train and deploy the machine learning model in a faster way, however both machine learning services are different.

• The Sagmaker of Amazon depends entirely on code whereas Microsoft Azure has an easy to use drag and drop UI in which the model building process is architected on canvas.
• Azure Studio won’t require their users to delve deeper into the Python coding, data engineering complexities, and various other open source libraries compared to Amazon Sagmaker.

AWS vs Azure Networking Features

Amazon AWS, a VPC peering is usually used as a networking connection between two VPCs, that enables users to route the traffic between them with the use of IPv4 addresses or IPv6 addresses. This will build isolated networks under the cloud umbrella.

On the other hand, Azure virtual private network (VNet) peering that assists users to seamlessly connect two or more Virtual Private Networks in Azure. As compared to AWS Virtual Private Cloud, VNet also lets their users do all stuff like VPC.

AWS vs Azure Security Features

Security is the most important concern in terms of both AWS and Azure cloud computing services. The security infrastructure on two best public cloud platforms provides assurance for safeguarding sensitive data of enterprises.

Amazon Web Services security features may includes

• AWS provides cloud centric Identity and Access Management without incurring any additional charges. It has integrated with other on-premises tools like Active Directory to achieve its functionality.
• Amazon AWS allows their users to manage their keys or choose to manage keys manually in terms of storage data encryption.
• The Cloudwatch of Amazon AWS provides monitoring functionality to enforce cloud security. It ensures integration of services and applications monitoring.

Whereas the security features of Microsoft Azure in comparison to AWS includes

• Microsoft Azure AD offers free tiers for certain data limits and three distinct paid tiers. Its paid tiers accompany advanced features like management of hybrid environments.
• As compared to AWS, Azure does support to allow their customers to manage keys of storage data encryption.
• It provides services monitoring and applications monitoring in which Azure Monitoring tracks all Azure services and the latter one monitors running applications.

Microsoft Azure comes with limited hassles and a formidable backward compatibility whereas AWS has better control and access to innovation.

Deploying Apps AWS vs Azure

Amazon AWS vs Microsoft Azure are the two most popular PaaS providing app hosting platforms in the cloud computing industry. Microsoft Azure Web Service  is a fully functional PaaS that integrates into a number of services such as Microsoft Azure Websites, Mobile Services and BizTalk services for a quick deployment of applications. This allows integrations with both cloud and on-premises solutions.

On the other hand, AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides quick deployment and management capabilities. It handles entire operations such as capacity browsing, auto-scaling, load balancing and the monitoring of performance of applications with ease.

Open Source Developers AWS vs Azure

Amazon Web Services is an excellent option for open source developers as it offers Linux users and provides several integrations for a number of open source applications. Whereas Microsoft Azure provides their users to use their current active account to sign on the Azure cloud platform and runs the .net framework on operating systems like Windows, MacOs, and Linux.

Computational Power of AWS vs Azure

Amazon Web Services provides secure and resizing computing features using the virtual services which are also known as instances. These virtual machines come with multiple services, most commonly Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2. Some of the other computing services of virtual machines include

• AWS EC2 Autoscaling: It is an instance that can automatically add or remove capacity of the cloud.
• AWS EC2 Spot: This can be used for running fault- tolerant workloads on a step discount.
• AWS Batch: Any processing scale completes in batches.
• AWS Lightsail: Website and app-building cloud interfaces.

Whereas Azure works on the similar business model as AWS but it offers their features and services with different names. The computing services of Azure may include

• Azure Spring Cloud: This is a kind of sleek and optimized app hosting tool.
• Batch: It can be used for batches and large scale computing tools.
• Virtual Machines: A classic method of running VMs.
• Container Instances: It is a kind of service that allows the rapid use of containers without virtual machine provisioning.

It is almost impossible to conclude whether between Amazon AWS vs Microsoft Azure, which one is best in terms of their computing power. Each of them provides necessary services such as instances and virtual machines, automatic scaling etc.

Storage Capacity between Amazon AWS vs Microsoft Azure

Both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure offer long running and reliable storage devices. AWS provides services such as EBS, Glacier and AWS S3 whereas Microsoft Azure offers disk storage, blob storage and a standard archive.

The Amazon Web services S3 service ensures an automatic replication and the high availability across various regions. The temporary storage services of AWS start functioning each time once the instances start and stop. After completing the task, it provides block storage which seems similar to a hard disk that can be attached with any EC2.

On the other hand, Microsoft Azure uses temporary storage and page blobs for VM volume. It also has a block storage option that acts as a counterpart to S3 in AWS. It also provides two types of storage i.e hot and cold storage.

AWS vs Azure Market Share

Amazon Web Services is one of the most popular cloud computing services providers across the world in terms of its revenue. The revenue of AWS is around 59 billion USD which is 37% positive revenue growth in the second quarter with respect to the first quarter of 2021. On the other hand, Azure has seen a growth of 50% in revenue with the numbers.

According to a report of Canalys published in April 2021, AWS is positioned as the top cloud computing service provider with a market share of 32% along with Azure at the second number with a share of 19% in the global market. This number suggests that Azure is in the race and will soon give a tough competition to AWS.

Content Delivery Between AWS vs Azure

AWS and Azure have built their cloud computing systems on networks of data centers all across the world. Both of them provide high speeds, incredible networking services with top notch security features.

Some of the highlights of Amazon AWS are

• Products for Networking: Virtual Networking, CDN, Dedicated interconnecting, load balancing and a DNS.
• CDN security of AWS is through its own AWS shield and Route 53 products.
• DNS service with latency and a geographical based routing.

Whereas, some of the common content features of Azure include

• Products for Networking: Virtual Networking, Dedicated interconnecting, CDN, load balancing and a DNS.
• CDN security is provided through some third party partners such as Verizon and Akamai.
• DNS service is offered through anycast serving however with no latency or geographical based routing.

In content delivery point of view between Amazon AWS vs Microsoft Azure, Azure is still Lies in the state of the art system for their networking and content delivery. AWS has a more powerful DNS and a high number of cloud networking locations.

AWS vs Azure Pricing

Costs are the most important factor for any organization seeking to move to cloud storage. With the continuous development of more and more companies, the subscription of AWS vs Azure Pricing is going on a downward trend for quite some time now. Both of them provide free introductory tiers with limited usages that let users to use their services prior to purchase. In addition to this, they also offer credits that can help in grabbing the attention of startups onto their cloud services. 

Amazon AWS works as a pay-as-you-go model and it charges on hourly basis whereas Microsoft Azure pricing is based on the same model but it can cost per minute. AWS can likewise assist you in saving your money with increased usages as more you use, the lesser you pay. The instances of AWS are based on the following models

• Reserved Instances: Pay an upfront cost based on use and one can also reserved instances for 1 to 3 years.
• On-demand Instance: Only service charges are applied and no upfront cost.
• Spot Instance: Bid for extra capacity on the basis of availability.

On the other hand, Microsoft Azure provides short term services to their users that let them choose between prepaid or monthly subscriptions. In the AWS vs Azure Pricing part, the latter one is a little more flexible than AWS in terms of cost.

Final Verdict AWS vs Azure

Now that we have tried to show you the best technology between AWS vs Azure in this article. There is no clear winner in these two cloud service providers as businesses have the option to choose any of these providers to enable a multi-cloud strategy. Both Microsoft Azure vs Amazon AWS continuously launches new pricing structures, new products and new integrations.

Microsoft Azure is convenient in terms of its setup for Windows whereas AWS is highly configured and feature enriched. Azure is leading the cloud world because of its features like Azure Site Recovery, Azure Scheduler, Visual Studio etc. On the other side, AWS seems to lead in terms of its flexibility, open source, adaptability and revenue generation. Thus the decision to choose any one cloud platform will depend on the requirements of the company.