Azure Cloud VS Amazon Web Services (AWS)
There are many great Cloud platforms to offer different services for a wide range of prices. Some of the Top leading cloud platforms are Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Both cover a wide range of services and a unique pricing model, as well as their respective learning cures. This will be a breakdown of Azure and AWS than a comparison of the features and pricing of both platforms.
Because Azure and AWS have a wide selection of services to offer to make things easier comparisons were done by taking a view of their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). This way a more in-depth look can be taken on a higher overview of each cloud computing platform.
Azure Breakdown
Overview:
Azure is a platform owned and operated by Microsoft for the public; it is available in 54 geographical regions. Many services range from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to Platform as a Service (PaaS). Microsoft offers many services to big data and analytics, game and mobile app development, data storage, and more. Overall, Azure is one of the largest and wide markets for large or small businesses to the average person.
Offerings:
Software as a Service:
Microsoft uses its Azure platform running to give users the most ease of use, all they have to handle is the data and access, while Azure will handle everything from applications, runtime, virtual machines (VMs), storage, and networking. This can be seen from such services as Outlook email, calendar, and Office 365.
Looking deeper at Office 365, a tool a person or large enterprise can purchase. The benefits of Office 365 are applications you access from the web and storage from anywhere. This allows for safer and more secure data at all times. As well as offerings to each user to customize the level of tools and storage needed in turn can save the user more money.
Platform as a Service:
Moving up to the next level, Azure offers the users to manage a bit more for example Data and Access, as well as what applications the user may want. This can be highly useful to developers that allow users to deploy their framework without having to worry about such things as runtimes and computing constraints. This is seen in tools that help with Data like Azure SQL Database which allows users to mine their data, finding insights and patterns. Also, application development using provided software components reduces cost and time for development.
Infrastructure as a Service:
Azure Infrastructure is the most flexible of the platform because the user is responsible for more, such as operating systems, data, and applications. While the user pays as you go for things like hardware, networks, storage, and operating systems. This allows for lower prices by increasing the scale and performance of IT workloads. As well as for testing and backing up company data.
This is seen in Azure virtual machines and Azure page blobs (Page blobs are ideal for storing index-based and sparse data structures like OS and data disks for Virtual Machines and Databases) of the virtual disk platform for Azure IaaS platforms.
Accessibility:
Azure a general user of services like office 365 and outlook email might find it easy to learn and start using right away, However, more advanced features tend to be more difficult to get familiar with for example if someone was to start using the virtual machines tools or deployment tool some learning and research would need to be done too effectively.
When it comes to pricing Azure can be broken down into a free tier and then into paid models that are based on Pay as You Go, Reserved Instances, and Spot Pricing. And more specific pricing is based on the service, for example, VMs which are done by general-purpose, compute-optimized, memory-optimized, storage-optimized, Graphical Processing Units (GPU), and High-performance computing (HPC).
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Breakdown
Overview:
Amazon Web Services is the biggest public cloud provider that offers a variety of computing services, from data management, and web and video delivery over the internet, to AI and machine learning tools. Customers have free or metered access to computing resources in Amazon’s data centers around the world.
Offerings:
Software as a Service:
Amazon also provides a suite of SaaS applications for users of all requirements, some common examples would be Customer Relationship Management software, Enterprise Resource Planning, Security Software, and Software for human resources to general business tools like Amazon WorkDocs for document editing.
Some examples of this can be seen in a partnership with CyberArk using AWS to create a platform that helps businesses find challenges of remote working, such as remote access management, which reduced their market time by 30%.
Platform as a Service:
Amazon offers a wide range of applications for PaaS, however, one of the more popular ones would be AWS Lambda. Lambda is a service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. Lambda can run any type of application or backend service.
This makes for a smoother development process and is cheaper than self-hosting being limited by your hardware and storage. This was with Lambda you can scale as you need to with no real threat of running into issues.
Infrastructure as a Service:
IaaS has the benefits of speed, performance, reliability, backup, and recovery. AWS strives to offer to its user by offering things like compute resources to VMs that you plan to run the heavy task on or less depending on the situation. Also, storage can be on block storage, file storage, or Object Storage. Also, you can even run Networking equipment as VMs as well.
Accessibility:
A user would need some time to learn and study the overall process of using AWS based on the services or software that they are trying to run; however, AWS is most notable as one top three biggest cloud platforms. That means there is great documentation on how everything works. The pricing is broken down similarly to azure with a free tier, then with five pricing models that are pay-as-you-go, spot instances, reserved instances, saving plan, and dedicated host pricing.
Overall Comparison of Azure and AWS
Features:
For computation power, AWS uses EC2 instances that are very flexible on request and Azure uses Virtual Machines. This allows for AWS to be more elastic and Azure to be a bit more hands-on. When it comes to Storage both AWS and Azure are strong in this category, Azure using Blob storage and AWS using Simple Storage Service (S3). Working with any type of software requires databases and AWS and Azure both support many instance types; however, AWS supports a bit more offering more control over the databases. Finally, dealing with networks AWS and Azure, allow you to create full-function networks within the cloud and offer firewalls to help with security going from physical to the cloud.
The ease of use would have to come down to the person and the conations that need to be met might be a breaking point between Azure or AWS. However, sometimes understanding Azure is easier for those who are already familiar with Microsoft technologies. You may therefore learn about either of them depending on your needs, but Amazon Web Services is the clear pick if you're looking for a cloud platform that's easy to use and comes with no limitations and limits would be AWS due to the great amount of documentation.
Pricing of Deployment:
Azure and AWS offer a free tier for use to get a feel for each platform before buying one of the other tiers. AWS offers a pay-as-you-go and charges per hour, while Azure is the same but charges by the minute. One big difference is that AWS will help you save with increased usage. Overall AWS offers Reserved Instances, an upfront cost based on the use, On-demand Instances where you just pay for what you use, and Spot instances where you bid for extra capacity. Azure use short-term commitments to the user of pre-paid or monthly payments. This makes AWS more flexible for pricing. Overall considering the pricing and level of learning each platform I would have to say AWS is more cost-effective and time and money to deploy over Azure.
Conclusion
In the end AWS and Azure have very similar offerings, just running in different ways. That being said based on those circumstances what really would have to come down for an enterprise to choose one or the other? Both are Industry leading and are great platforms in their rights. Effectively, comes down to a user’s needs and time that are willing to deploy an online cloud platform like Azure or Amazon Web Services
Works Cited
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