Difference between AWS and Azure cloud– In this digital era, gone are the days of using physical storage devices, thanks to public cloud services. And two of the biggest names in this domain are AWS and Microsoft Azure.
Hello readers! Today I am going to compare both cloud giants and discuss which one is to choose? So, without any further delays, let’s get started.
Difference between AWS and Azure cloud
First of all, let’s take a brief look at both of these cloud services(“Difference between AWS and Azure cloud“- AWS vs Azure). Starting off with Amazon Web Services(AWS).
What is AWS?
According to their official website, Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary of Amazon.com that provides on-demand cloud computing platform to individuals, companies, and governments, on a paid subscription basis.
What is Azure?
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft managed data centers.
Also Read- What is Serverless Computing?
Difference between AWS and Azure cloud
Establishment
Now let’s dig into their history and talk about their establishment.
Launched in 2006, AWS has more experience in the cloud domain than azure or any other cloud providers and has successfully met the on-demand needs of enterprises in regard to the cloud computing platform.
On the other hand, launched in 2010, Azure has been a consistent competitor for AWS and is quiet a competent cloud computing platform for businesses.
But the question remains, how are these two cloud services different and what are the factors that we need to focus on while comparing AWS & Azure? Well, you’re about to find out.
Availability Zones AWS vs Azure
Now let’s start from the basic and discuss the first factor, that is the availability zone.
As we have already gone through the establishment factor, we already know that AWS was the first one of its kind. Which means AWS is hosting in multiple locations worldwide, of course, it’s true for Azure as well. But the difference occurs in the number of regions and availability zones.
Talking of numbers, AWS has 55 availability zones world-wide with 8 more on its way. Whereas, azure is having 44 availability zones with a whopping number of 12 more on the way.
Market Shares
Talking of the next factor, that is the market shares. AWS is having 40% of public cloud market shares worldwide, whereas Azure is having 30% of it. An interesting fact to notice here, that there is no other cloud provider that lies between these two numbers in terms of public cloud market shares making AWS on the first and Azure on the second place.
Popularity AWS vs Azure
If you check the Google trends and see compare the popularity, these are the stats, where you can easily figure out how interest for AWS has been surpassing azure worldwide in the past 12 months.
Also, if we check their search results and trends according to the USA, the same case is here as well, where there is more interest in AWS than Azure.
In the case of India, here are the results. Still, AWS is more trending than Azure.
Making Azure a tough competition for AWS, you must have a question in your mind, that there must be other cloud providers between these numbers, well check out the results while comparing other cloud vendors, like Google & IBM Cloud along with Rackspace. It shows that azure is still on the 2nd number and they both have been more trending than any other cloud vendors.
But, let me tell you an interesting fact that, from the past survey by Forbes.com, Azure surpassed Amazon in Cloud revenue from 6 Billion dollars to 5.44 Billion dollars. This is the survey report of April 2018.
Also Read- What is Cloudification?
Who’s using them?
Now what we can conclude from the fact that AWS is in the first place as a cloud provider is that it obviously has bigger community support and trust across its clients. This is the reason why AWS has more high-profile customers like Netflix, Airbnb, Unilever, BMW, Samsung, MI, Zynga, etc.
No doubt, Azure is also not that behind as almost 80% of the fortune 500 companies have put their faiths in Azure recently. Some of its major clients are Johnson Controls, Polycom, Fujifilm, HP, Honeywell, Apple, etc.
So, isn’t it quite impressive for a public cloud provider that’s relatively new when compared to a titleholder such as AWS?
Now after discussing their establishment in the market, let’s talk about what each provider has to offer in terms of services.
The services which I am going to compare here comes under the following domains:
- Compute
- Database
- Storage
- Security
- Networking
- Monitoring
- Development
- Internet of Things
AWS and Azure both covers like 100+ services. So, in these domains some of the services that AWS covers are AWS EC2, AWS RDS, AWS, S3, AWS IAM, AWS VPC, AWS CloudWatch, AWS Cloud9, AWS IoT Core and many more. Similarly, Azure covers the service like Virtual Machine, SQL Database, Blob Storage, Active Directory, Virtual Network, Azure Monitor, Visual Studio, Azure IoT Hub and many more.
Now another factor is its integration with the open-source tools.
Open-Source Integration
Amazon has had quite better relations with the open-source communities, leading to more open-source integrations with AWS, which includes open-source tools like Jenkins, Docker, Ansible, Github and it’s also friendlier when it comes to Linux servers.
In the case of Azure, it offers native integrations for Windows development tools such as VBS, SQL database, Active Directory. We all know, when it comes to open-source, Microsoft hasn’t always embraced this model, but recently they have been catching up with it and, now the organizations can run RedHat Enterprise Linux edition and Hadoop clusters in Azure.
Pricing Models AWS vs Azure
After discussing their services, now let’s check their pricing models.
In the case of AWS, a very basic instance which includes 2 virtual CPUs and 8GB of RAM will cost you around -0.0928 USD/Hour. And similarly, in case of Azure, it costs you approximately -0.096 USD/Hour. Also, the largest instance offered by AWS is 256 GB RAM along with 64 virtual CPUs which costs you around 3.20 USD/Hour. And in case of Azure, it also offers you 256 GB RAM with 64 virtual CPUs, but it costs you 6.76 USD/Hour, which gets quite expensive in terms of high usage.
So, this was the detailed comparison between both AWS and Azure(‘Difference between AWS and Azure cloud- AWS vs Azure’). I’d love to hear from you that which one of them is better according to you and why? Please reply to us in the comments section below.
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