Both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services are leading giants of the Cloud Computing Platforms! Let’s deep-dive to analyze who is better…and discover their pros and cons. This might aid your decision-making about Cloud Platforms either to Save Cost or Secure data.
In our blog on Cloud Computing, we have spoken about the SaaS and the IaaS models in detail. The two most popular Cloud offerings are – the Software-as-a-Service [SaaS] and Infrastructure-as-a-Service [IaaS] models. Sounds plain simple, but in reality; these Cloud platforms have many facets to consider. Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services are two leading providers of cloud storage options. Both of them are also leading IaaS public cloud vendors. Both Microsoft Azure and AWS have similar basic capabilities for computing, storage, and networking.
Let us try and familiarize you with some of them:
Microsoft Azure VS Amazon Web Services
| Differentiators | Microsoft Azure | Amazon Web Services |
| File Storage | Azure File Storage with a capacity of 5TB per file and 500 TB per account, 60 MBps throughput
Backup – Azure Backup | Elastic Files System – Mount files from AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual machines within a virtual private cloud, on-premise AWS Connect or Virtual Private Connection (VPC) – 1 TB per file 50 MB per second, 50MBps throughput
Backup – 3rd Party tools |
| Block Storage
Category I – Magnetic Spinning Hard drives disks Category II – Solid State Disks [SSD] | SSD- Managed Disks available in Standard and Premium Solid State Disks | Elastic Block Storage available which are traditional magnetic, spinning disks or Cold HDD |
| SLA Availability | 99.99% Availability for Block Storage Services | 99.95% Availability for Block Storage Services |
| Max IOPs per volume – Guaranteed input/output per second, indication of how fast the storage saves new information and reads information stored | 5,000 IOPs
1 GB to 1 TB volume sizes, but Best price/performance ratio for block storage in between $0.12 and $0.14 | 10,000 IOPs
500 GB to 16 TB volume sizes Mid Level Price/performance ratio for block storage at $ 0.10 |
| Object Storage – Single or Multiple region storages ensuring high availability of data during outages | Single Region Storage – Globally Redundant Storage
Cool Blob Storage cost much lesser | Multiple Regions – S3 Infrequent Access
Glacier Costs twice higher |
| Computing | Virtual Machines (VMs), Cloud Services, Resource Manager & Auto Scaling – Billed by minute basis | Elastic Beanstalk – App Development, Ec2 Container Services, AWS Lambda & Auto Scaling – Billed on an hourly basis |
The Verdict
Amazon Web Services is rated higher in some aspects such as development and testing tools but Microsoft Azure receive a bigger pull, clearly where Microsoft has strong footing within an organization. Azure links well with Key on-premise systems like the Window Server, System Center and Active Directory. While both have PaaS capabilities too, it has always been the main strength of Microsoft.
For any organization which has invested majorly in Microsoft Technologies and Developer Skills, Microsoft Azure continues to remain in a strong position. It is rapidly becoming the most preferred choice for an integrated cloud platform for computing, networking, analytics, database, storage, mobile and web services.
Talk or write to us know how Microsoft Azure can change the pace of your company’s growth and goals… solutions@katprotech.com
