Back in 2008, Microsoft made the announcement of releasing Microsoft Azure, but its official launch came in late 2010.
Initially, Azure was titled as Windows Azure during its announcement. However, in 2014, it was finally rechristened as the current title, Microsoft Azure. Its main rival, Amazon AWS, has already created the market by launching its own Amazon ECC or Elastic Compute Cloud in 2006 and now it has over 35% of the total market share.
Over the years, the Microsoft Azure has finally risen in ranks and even emerged as a worthy contender for the pole position of Amazon AWS. Being winning the market share swiftly, it has left behind Google, Rackspace, IBM Cloud, Salesforce and much more.
For any Microsoft Technology Associate or customer, Azure is a great choice owing to its seamless integration. Also, Microsoft is also seen to make a great commitment to converting the cloud into its own epicenter of business. It is slowly backing off from customer-centric offerings and now putting in more investment into the cloud-centric businesses. Soon, Microsoft Azure will start occupying a major part in the market pie of Amazon AWS. But does Microsoft Azure seriously giving a stiff competition to Amazon? Well, this question is up for contention and to answer it, let’s have a look at what these services are and what the present situation is.
Amazon AWS
The cloud service platform of Amazon, the Amazon Web Services or AWS, essentially offers services in various areas like storage, computing, delivery and a plethora of other feature which can easily help the businesses to scale as well as develop easily. Anyone can use these different domains in the type of services that can be utilized to create as well as deploy various kinds of applications in an entire cloud platform.
Also, the design of these particular services even allows them to work with each other easily as well as to actually produce an efficient and extensible result. Also, the services offered by the AWS are certainly divided into three kinds like IaaS or Infrastructure as a Services, SaaS or Software as a Service and PaaS or Platform as a Service. Amazon AWS was duly launched back in 2006, and it has been the best cloud platform among the different available cloud platforms. It has a wide range of advantages, like minimizing costs, reducing management overhead, etc. When it comes to Sharepoint consulting, Amazon AWS is a pretty obvious choice for the businesses.
Microsoft Azure
It is a cloud service platform of Microsoft that offers services in various domains including storage, databases, computing, networking, developers tools and a plethora of other features that assist o organize the overall expansion as well as the overall development of the businesses. The entire Azure service is majorly divided into PaaS or Platform as a Service, SaaS or Software as a Service, as well as, IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service.
The developers, as well as the software employees, can easily utilize them to readily create, along with deploy, as well as manage services and applications in different ways such as a cloud. Azure was launched in 2010 is quickly becoming one of the biggest business cloud service providers. Azure offers a wide range of different integrated Azure Cloud Solutions as well as features including computing, analytics, networking, storage, database, web and mobile application which are seamlessly integrated with the business environment in order to improve efficiency as well as achieve scalability.
Now, let’s look at the comparison of both the services and compare them with each other on different aspects.
Aspects-wise Comparison of Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS
1. Geographical distribution of Data Centres
Both Microsoft, as well as Amazon, have their own data centres located all over the world, in a quiet way, at similar locations in order to provide support to major computing hubs. Both Azure and AWS services provide options for load balancing as well as replication across different regions as well.
Read the blog- MS Azure Sphere – A New Phase For The Industrial Internet Of Things
However, by 2017, AWS had much more existing as well as planned locations. Still, Azure was stronger in different regions like India where they had established 3 data centres, will AWS has only 2 in India. When it comes down to growth, both of them have added about ten new locations over the last ten months.
2. Pricing
When it comes down to the costs, it is similar for both of the players while each of them is certainly offering a wide range of separately sized instances in order to fit the requirements of various organizations. Both of these companies also provide discounts in case you are paying in advance, generally on a yearly basis.
AWS charges, for instance, usage per hour whereas Microsoft Azure cloud services charges per minute. So, in case you are using AWS for 1 hour and 1 minute, then you would be charged for 2 hours of usage as they actually round up the time to the next hour.
Another major difference is that in the case of Azure, the instances include a fixed amount of data storage, but with AWS, you have to buy the storage capacity separately at an additional price. However, the upside of AWS storage is that it is highly customizable as per your requirements, while the downside being its pricing as well as setup being not so straightforward.
3. Support
Both Microsoft Azure, as well as Amazon AWS, provides multiple tiers of support which range from free to thousands of dollars per month. The pricing actually varies depending on the initial response time promised which can be quicker than 15 minutes if you can pay up, along with access to a dedicated technical account manager, access to phone support, support for third-party software, number of users and much more.
In case of paid technical support offerings for the IaaS offered by Amazon as well as Microsoft can vary quite but so there doesn’t exist anyone ratio one comparison in all areas.
4. Uptime and Reliability
Azure VM, as well as AWS EC2, often strive for providing greater than 99.95% availability and now they are offering a 10% credit to the customers in case the service availability drops below this particular figure in a given month. Also, if the uptime ever goes below the two nines or 99% in a month, then the credit directly jumps to a whopping 25% for Azure, and in the case of Amazon, it is 30%. However, both try to stay close to their respective goals, but they have experienced outages periodically, which affected popular customer-centric services like Office 365, Netflix and much more.
5. Perceptions of IT Professionals
According to IT professionals, both have their characteristics traits that they prefer. Some of them are:
Microsoft Azure
- Highly trusted as well as user-friendly as per IT professionals who are familiar with Microsoft products.
- Integration with on-premises Windows or even Hyper-V servers in the entire hybrid cloud.
- Great ease-of-use as well as simple setup from the dedicated Microsoft portal.
- Convenient for Windows admins as they don’t have to learn any new platform.
- Easier to quickly stand up different Microsoft services in the entire cloud along with offerings like Azure Active Directory as well as Azure SQL Database. This makes it a preferred choice for Sitecore CMS development services.
Amazon AWS
- Pioneer in cloud computing and introducing new features continuously.
- Highly configurable along with feature-rich as well as powerful offering. However, a bit complicated yet provides lots of customization.
- Useful for running different web-scale projects like Yelp and Netflix, which server millions of users.
- Great for operating non-Windows services like Linux web servers.
- Provides support for a considerable range of third-party integrations.
When it comes down to AWS, it is relatively easy for the customers to get going and it is quite fast even with having the most basic resources. It is quite reliable. The overall capability of the Azure along with its functionality keeps on increasing as the entire product remains to be among the best cloud computing solutions, platforms as well as infrastructure providers. It is tightly-woven or integrated with other different Microsoft services and offers businesses the required infrastructure in order to operate when they don’t have enough budget to invest in their own IT infrastructure.
Read the blog- Microsoft Azure Vs Amazon AWS Results Will Inform Us Who Will Win
Feature-wise Comparison of Microsoft Azure and AWS
1. Computing
When it comes to computing purposes, Microsoft Azure utilizes its own virtual machines, and in order to scale for a much large extent it utilizes virtual machine scale sets and also for software management in Docker container, it utilizes Container Service, AKS, and utilizes Container Register for the entire purpose of Docker Container registry.
AWS utilizes a primary solution for scalable computing as well as management of software container with the Docker, it utilizes EC2 Container Service and also EC2 container registry.
2. Shortage
Azure utilizes Storage Block blob for the purpose of storage that is comprised of blocks and then uploads large blobs much more efficiently.
AWS uses Simple Storage Service or S3, which is the longest-running, more than Azure, and it offers lots of necessary documentation and even tutorials.
3. Database
Azure utilizes MySQL, SQL database and PostgreSQL for the purpose of a relational database. So hire dot net developers who have the knowledge of these databases in order to leverage the benefits of Azure.
AWS utilizes a relational database a particular service using RDS. In the case of NoSQL, it utilizes Dynamo DB and even caching it uses the Elastic Cache.
Conclusion
With the above discussion, it is certainly quite clear that Microsoft Azure is seriously giving quite a stiff competition to Amazon. As we all know, Microsoft is quite late in the case of cloud technology with respect to Amazon, but if we consider past trends, we see a picture where Azure is performing quite better than Amazon in almost every domain.
Microsoft Azure is leading as customers are already using Microsoft for internal purposes if not all services such as Messaging, Identity, Desktop, and even monitoring and much more. It is easier to extend the local network into Microsoft Azure as it allows to start slow and small and increases the pace as required. It is quite simple to start utilizing Azure, even in case of testing as well as development. From a corporate perspective too, Azure makes quite a good sense as most of the IT staff are often trained in the servers, and not really in the platform.
Azure is well-integrated and quite hard to search and find and/or create silos in it. Azure also has an expanding set of different cloud services in order to help businesses to meet their business challenges. It includes pre-built templates, integrated tools, as well as managed services which makes it quite easier to create and manage enterprise, web, mobile and IoT apps much faster. Both privacy and security is to build into the Microsoft Azure platform. It provides solution partners who can assist in deploying as well as management of your existing solutions and even provide custom or ready-made solutions for you.
Microsoft Azure cloud services support open source technologies which mean you can utilize the tools as well as technologies that you prefer. It offers flexible pricing and purchasing options for all of your cloud scenarios like Azure Hybrid Benefit and provides extensive tools in order to manage the cloud spend. It offers solutions for all industrial verticals. It is quite clear that Microsoft Azure has offered better provisions to their customers. As most of the customers are well-versed with Microsoft technologies, it becomes easier for them to get working with Azure.
The pricing option is quite attractive as it charges per minute, which is way better than Amazon which charges per hour, and as shown before, Azure seems to be a sensible choice with respect to pricing. Azure Cloud solutions have great support, and with an increasing number of data centres, it will provide seamless support to most of its clients all over the world. It has already the number of data centres in India than Amazon, which is the IT hub in that part of the region.