Microsoft Azure vs AWS: Choosing the best cloud solution
Cloud computing has become a key driver of all businesses today. Organizations are adopting the cloud to innovate, reduce costs, and increase agility by moving applications from on-premises data centers. The key industry players in the cloud computing market are:
- Amazon AWS
- Microsoft Azure
- Google Cloud
What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is an on-demand delivery for its resources via the internet, with pay-as-you-go pricing. What makes it more preferable is that in order to access the technology it offers like storage, databases, computing power, etc from cloud providers like Azure or AWS, you need not necessarily buy or own it. This allows one to conveniently maintain their servers and physical data centers. Your organization can become more nimble, save money, rapidly growing, and deploy globally in minutes using cloud computing.
Cloud services:
- IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service)
- PaaS (Platforms-as-a-Service)
- SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)
What is AWS?
Amazon Web Service is one of the leading cloud providers in the marketplace. AWS was established in the year 2006, it holds a market share of 31.7 percent. AWS services are provided based on a subscription basis. Amazon AWS is the world’s most broadly adopted cloud platform; it offers up to 165 services globally. These services are used by millions of companies like Spotify, Netflix, Facebook, BBC, etc.
Amazon Web Services is an evolving cloud computing platform that offers various services such as compute power, storage database, content delivery, and other resources to help businesses scale and grow.
It has infrastructure all over the world, so you’re able to deploy your application in multiple physical locations in just a few clicks. The AWS pricing model is based on an hourly basis. In AWS every individual pays only for the services that are required for his or her work and every person only wants to pay for the services he or she consumes.
What is Microsoft Azure?
Microsoft Azure provides a set of cloud services to design, create and monitor applications on a network and azure is another leading cloud provider in the marketplace. Microsoft Azure was started in the year 2010 and now has a market share of up to 16.8 percent.
It offers several services in various categories including artificial intelligence, analytics, containers, IoT, and many more. These services are used by many famous companies like Accenture, LinkedIn, eBay, Samsung, etc.
Azure pricing is charged on a per-minute basis. The payment system is very simple and doesn’t involve any long-term contracts. Microsoft azure is free of upfront cost and cancellation fees and only users pay for the resources they consume.
Which is better to choose?
AWS and Azure provide a wide variety of services with low migration costs so that every individual can shift his or her current traditional infrastructure to a cloud platform very easily.
AWS EC2 is a suitable example of computing services. EC2 is a web service that aims to make life easier for developers by providing secure and resizable compute capacity in the cloud it can be integrated into several other services like S3, IAM, CloudFormation, etc.
Azure has a small service called Azure virtual machine image, it helps the developers to develop and design identical virtual machines in a matter of minutes. Azure virtual machines are becoming more popular among its infrastructures, these machines let an individual create and use virtual machines in the cloud as Infrastructure-as-a-Service.
Amazon s3 is the best example of a storage service. A simple storage service is an object storage service designed to store and recover any information from anywhere via the internet. Amazon s3 facilitates storage through a web service interface. The service provides 99.9 durability’s and 99.9 availability of objects. It has the capacity of storing computer files up to 5 terabytes in size.
On the other hand, Azure provides a similar service called blob storage service. This service provides a large amount of storage and is highly scalable, it stores an object in the tires depending on how often the data is being accessed. Blob storage supports widely used frameworks like java dot net bison and node.js,. It is the only cloud storage service in Microsoft Azure that offers a premium SSD-based object storage tire for low latency networks.
AWS provides a secure cloud platform where every individual can manage and deploy their applications. Compared to the on-premises environment AWS security offers a high level of data protection at a lower cost. For security purposes, IAM is a suitable service.
AWS identity and access management is a cloud service that controls and manages AWS resources securely. It has no upfront cost and also gives a facility to create and maintain services within a specific set of users on your AWS resources.
In Microsoft Azure, Azure Active Directory in short also called Azure AD is a web service that provides MFA (multi-factor authentication) features to users in order to protect their data from cyber-attacks.
In Conclusion
That was all about Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. Both AWS and Azure are honored to be on top of all other cloud providers. Both provide all necessary features like scalability, high availability, and security. Coming back to which cloud platform to choose, this completely depends upon individual business needs, both cloud providers are the certified ones that hold immense value in the current cloud service market.
