Key Differences Between AWS And AZURE

Status of Cloud Solutions and Job Opportunities:

Organizations are gradually shifting to more advanced and efficient Cloud storage solutions from traditional storage devices. As per Forbes, 83% of Enterprise Workloads will be in the Cloud By 2020 extracting more job opportunities. According to Gartner, there were 50,248 job openings in the US itself as of 2018 from 3,701 employers and 101,913 open positions worldwide. Oracle, Deloitte, and Amazon have the highest number of open cloud computing jobs today.

Amongst various Public Cloud Platforms, Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft Azure are the most popular ones.

What is (Amazon Web Services) AWS?

Amazon Web Services or AWS is an on-demand cloud computing platform for Amazon. AWS started the pay-as-you-go cloud computing model. It provides users with storage, compute services or throughput as required. Amazon Web Services offers services from various data centers across Availability Zones (AZs) in different regions across the globe.

What is Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure is a public cloud computing platform and one of the significant providers of cloud services. It was initially named as “Windows Azure” in 2010, but in 2014 it was changed to Microsoft Azure. It is a significant provider of cloud-based solutions present across 36 regions around the world. It provides a host of cloud services such as data storage, compute services, networking, management and security, media and content delivery network (CDN), web and mobile, hybrid integration, Internet of Things, and more.

The differences provided below might help one to understand the services better and compare not only for organizations but also to the learning community to help them know which cloud is best to start with a career in cloud computing.

The inception of the Institutions:

AWS was started in 2004; therefore it holds a decade long presence and experience in the market. Initially, AWS offered only SQS services. However, after expanding services, the tech giant started offering other cloud services such as S3, AWS, CloudFront, Amazon RDS, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and Amazon EC2.

Microsoft Azure is a newcomer established in 2014 to the market as compared to AWS. Microsoft Azure started as a compute cloud, but later the company began to provide services in others areas such as SQL Database, Cloud Services, Virtual Machines, Azure Active Directory, Azure CDN, and App Services.

Core Functions

The primary features of AWS are Storage & Content Delivery, Networking, Database, and Compute. These features work consistently with a unique admin panel of Amazon that includes auditing, identity management, control/encryption, essential creation or storage, monitoring, and logging, etc. AWS users also possess a lot of deployment options as well as application services along with powerful analytics.

Azure covers all the above features, but in four different functions. The platform allows users to develop modern applications, management access, build infrastructure, identity, and gain insights from data. Additionally, Azure also contains HDInsight, Apache Storm, and Hadoop implementation to perform a real-time streaming process. Users can start right away to develop and deploy the apps without any hassle.

Storage

AWS provides temporary storage which is assigned once the instance is commenced and is destroyed in case the storage is terminated. AWS also includes block storage similar to hard disks. Data archiving services are offered with Glacier, and Object storage is provided with S3.

Microsoft Azure provides block storage through page blobs for VMs and temporary storage through D drive. Files and Block Blobs server for Object Storage.

Database

• AWS works with NoSQL and relational databases, offering a sophisticated cloud environment for big data.
• Amazon’s RDS supports database engines such as – MariaDB, Microsoft SQL, Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Oracle
• Azure supports NoSQL and relational databases.
• Through Azure HDInsight and Azure table, it supports Big Data
• Azure’s SQL database service is entirely based on MS SQL Server

Networking

AWS provides Virtual Private Cloud (VPC),  which helps users to create isolated cloud networks. Users can also create network gateways, private IP address ranges, route tables, and subnets within a VPC.

Microsoft Azure provides Virtual Network (VNET) for users to create isolated networks.

Compute

AWS’ primary solution for compute services is its EC2 instances which provide scalable computing on-demand. Other related services are also offered, such as the EC2 container service, Autoscaling, AWS Lambda, and Elastic Beanstalk for app deployment.

Microsoft Azure’s compute offerings are based on VMs with multiple other tools such as Resource Manager and Cloud Services, which help deploy applications on the cloud.

Pricing Models

AWS offers a pay-as-you-go model. In this model, they charge per hour. Following are the models in which Instances can be purchased:

• Spot Instances – Customers can bid for extra capacity based on the availability
• On-Demand Instances – Customers can pay for what they use without any upfront cost
• Reserved Instances – Customers can pay an upfront cost as per the use for a specific duration for ex: 1-3 years

Azure also offers a Pay-as-You model. In this model, they charge per minute. It also provides with the options between pre-paid or monthly charges as short term commitments.

Conclusion

It is difficult to choose between AWS and Azure, as both the providers keep coming with new pricing structures, new integrations, and new products. However, organizations may choose either a multi-cloud strategy or single cloud strategy according to the requirements and needs.

Author Bio:

Jane Thomson is a Content Marketing Manager at GreyCampus with five years rich experience on developing content for professional certification courses like PMP- Project Management Professional, PMI-ACP, Six Sigma, AWS, and ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library).