Key differences between AWS and Microsoft Azure

Posted on June 6, 2017 by Carrie Kennedy

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are two of the biggest names in public cloud
computing. Which one is right for you? To help you make that decision, let’s talk about what
each provider brings to the public cloud table, and key differences between them.

Compute power
AWS: AWS EC2 users can configure their own VMs or choose pre-configured machine images,
or customize MIs. Users choose size, power, memory capacity and number of VMs, and choose
from different regions and availability zones with which to launch from.

Azure: Azure users choose Virtual Hard Disk (VHD), which is equivalent to a Machine
Instance, to create a VM. VHD can be pre-configured by Microsoft, the user or a third party. The
user must specify the amount of cores and memory.

Storage
AWS: AWS has temporary storage that is allocated once an instance is started and destroyed
when the instance is terminated. They also provide block storage (same as hard disks), that can
be separate or attached to an instance. Object storage is offered with S3; and data archiving
services with Glacier. Fully supports relational and NoSQL databases and Big Data.

Azure: Azure offers temporary storage through D drive, block storage through Page Blobs for
VMs. Block Blobs and Files also serve as object storage. Supports relational databases; NoSQL
and Big Data through Azure Table and HDInsight. Azure also offers site recovery, Import Export
and Azure Backup for additional archiving and recovery options.

Network
AWS: Amazon offers Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) so users can create isolated networks within
the cloud. Within a VPC, a user can create subnets, route tables, private IP address ranges, and
network gateways.

Azure: Microsoft offers Virtual Network (VNET) that offers users ability to create isolated
networks as well as subnets, route tables, private IP address ranges and network gateways. Both
companies offer solutions to extend the on-premise data center into the cloud and firewall option.

Pricing Models
AWS: Amazon has a pay-as-you-go model, where they charge per hour. Instances are
purchasable on the following models:
 1. On demand: Pay for what you use without upfront cost
2. Reserved: Reserve an instance for 1 or 3 years with upfront cost based on use
3. Spot: Customers bid for extra capacity available

Azure: Microsoft’s pricing is also pay-as-you-go, but they charge per minute, which provides a
more exact pricing model. Azure also offers short term commitments with the option between
pre-paid or monthly charges.

Support Plans
AWS: Pricing is based on a sliding scale tied to monthly usage, so your bill could potentially be
quite high if you’re a heavy user.

Azure: Users are billed a flat monthly rate.

Integrations and Open Source

AWS: Amazon has had a better relationship with the open source community, so there are more
open source integrations available in this platform, including Jenkins and GitHub. It’s also
friendlier to Linux servers.

Azure: If you’re already using Windows development tools such as VBS, SQL database, Active
Directory, Azure offers native integration for these tools. For example, use the same AD
accounts you currently have to sign into Office 365 or Azure SQL instances. Azure is also good
for .net developers. When it comes to open source, Microsoft hasn’t always embraced the
model, but Azure is catching up–organizations now can run Red Hat Enterprise Linux and
Apache Hadoop clusters in Azure.

Containers and Orchestration Support

AWS: Amazon continually invests in meeting demand for new services, resulting in more
mature analytics offerings. (eg Hadoop support provided by AWS Elastic Map Reduce). They’ve
added machine learning tools and features targeted at IoT, and allow customers to build mobile
apps or create high performance computing environment depending on needs. They also offers
support for Docker.

Azure: Microsoft also has a strong track record for meeting new demand, and offers Hadoop
support with Azure HDInsight.Windows Server 2016 provides integration with Docker for both
Windows containers and Hyper-V containers. The platform can run Windows or Linux
containers, making it a formidable competitor with Amazon.

Compliance
AWS: Amazon has had a long relationship with government agencies, and their compliance
offerings include certifications in ITAR, DISA, HIPAA, CJIS, FIPS, and more. They also
provide security so that only screened persons can access the cloud, a must for agencies handling
sensitive information.

Azure: Microsoft claims to have more than 50 compliant offerings, including ITAR, DISA,
HIPAA, CJIS, FIPS. Microsoft provides the same level of security as Amazon, setting up
permissions so that only screened persons can access a government-level cloud.

User-friendliness
AWS: Amazon offers more features and configurations– if you’re willing to learn the system. IT
pros agree that AWS offers a lot of power, flexibility, customization room with support for many
third-party integrations. But there is a learning curve with AWS.

Azure: If you’re a Windows admin, Azure will be easier to use out of the box because it is a
Windows platform and doesn’t require learning something new. It’s simple to integrate on-
premises Windows servers with cloud instances to create a hybrid environment. Tools such as
SQL database and Active Directory work well with Azure.

Licensing
AWS: Amazon offers a few different options for licensing in the cloud: Customers can purchase
new licenses (bundled with EC2 or Relational Database Services instances), or bring their
previously purchased licenses (BYOL), as part of their partnership with Microsoft. In this case,
users can use Dedicated Hosts or Software Assurance to move their licenses to the cloud. Before
licenses can be migrated, users must make sure that all Microsoft Server application products
migrated to cloud Service provider via the License Mobility through Software Assurance
program must be covered with active Software Assurance (SA). The server applications must
also be on the list of eligible products, which includes Exchange Server, SQL Server Enterprise
Edition, and Sharepoint Server. More information about licensing in AWS can be found here.

Azure: Microsoft offers license mobility for qualifying application servers, but users must
determine if their servers fit the requirements for mobility to avoid paying for extra licensing.
Windows Server itself is NOT eligible (eg, running on-premises Windows Server with SQL
server). If you spin up a VM in the cloud running the same stack, you will pay for two Windows
server licenses since that license is charged per usage and not eligible for mobility. However, a
SQL license is eligible, so you can use that to run SQL server in the cloud. Read more about
Azure licensing mobility here.

Hybrid Cloud Capabilities

AWS: AWS unveiled Snowball Edge in November, a 100TB hard drive for moving workloads
between its cloud and clients’ data centers. It also added a much needed hybrid element to its
portfolio when it partnered with VMware in October to allow their customers to burst into its
cloud environments. However, Amazon has only recently taken up the hybrid cloud banner, and
with its past public stances of “pure public cloud or nothing” it is still developing its hybrid
story.

Azure: As a longtime legacy IT provider, Microsoft has strong support for hybrid cloud services,
with platforms like Azure StorSimple, Hybrid SQL Server, and Azure Stack, a new hybrid cloud
platform product that allows you to bring nearly full public Azure functionality to your own on-
premises data centers using the same pay-as-you-go pricing model it offers for its public cloud.

Conclusion
AWS and Azure offer many similar capabilities, so it’s not necessarily a matter of one provider
being “better” or “worse” than the other. It all depends on what your business needs. If you’re
debating between AWS and Azure, we can help! Contact us to learn more.

AWS vs Azure vs Google: What's the best cloud platform for the
enterprise?

It's the defining cloud battle of our time: AWS vs Microsoft Azure vs Google Cloud Platform. Who
can win the IaaS enterprise market? ComputerworldUK takes a look at the merits of the big three
vendors
Matthew Finnegan and Scott Carey September 20, 2017

Contents
 Features and services
 Compute, storage, databases and networking
 Pricing
 Customers
 AWS pros and cons
 Azure pros and cons
 Google Cloud Platform pros and cons
 Verdict
The adoption of cloud computing has quickly become a key driving force for businesses today,
as applications are moved out of on-premise data centres in a bid to cut costs and increase agility.

Early concerns over security and data sovereignty have largely been addressed by the big three
public cloud vendors: Amazon Web Service (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud
Platform, with only the most heavily regulated businesses lagging behind in terms of adoption.

This has fueled a crowded infrastructure-as-a service (IaaS) market, worth a total of $25 billion
in 2016, according to Gartner's most recent statistics, which project the market will reach $45
billion by 2018.

IaaS is a model where a third-party provider hosts and maintains core infrastructure, including
hardware, software, servers and storage on behalf of a customer. This typically includes the
hosting of applications in a highly scalable environment, where customers are only charged for
the infrastructure they use.

AWS has dominated the market since it started offering cloud services in 2006. A Synergy
Research report from February 2017 puts AWS' market share at 40 percent, with Microsoft,
Google and IBM, which they have grouped together, at 23 percent combined.

But despite AWS’s dominance, Microsoft has quickly gained ground under the leadership of
"cloud first" CEO Satya Nadella, building a huge global cloud network of its own. Then there is
the internet giant Google, which has been busy building out its public cloud services and IaaS
business under the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Features and services

Selecting one cloud over the others will come down to the wants and needs of each individual
customer and the workloads they are running. It is often the case that organisations will use
multiple providers within different parts of their operations, or for different use cases, called a
multi-cloud approach.

However, there are a number of differentiating factors that separate the approaches of the three
firms, which can help end-users consider which is right for them.

AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform offer largely similar basic capabilities
around flexible compute, storage and networking. They all share the common elements of a
public cloud: self-service and instant provisioning, autoscaling, plus security, compliance and
identity management features.

All three are investing heavily in their cloud services, and have sizable parent companies to do
so. This has resulted in more mature analytics offerings. For example, support for Hadoop
clusters are provided by AWS (Elastic Map Reduce), Azure (HDInsight) and Google (Dataproc).
AWS still offers the largest range of services with nearly 100 across compute, storage, database,
analytics, networking, mobile, developer tools, management tools, IoT, security and enterprise
applications. But it has been around the longest.

All three vendors have added machine learning tools and a number of features targeted at cutting
edge technology areas like the Internet of Things (IoT) and serverless computing (Lambda for
AWS, Functions with Azure and Google), while customers can tap either cloud to variously
build a mobile app or even create a high performance computing environment depending on their
needs.

Naturally, all three vendors are strong in machine learning as they can draw on deep wells of
internal expertise.

AWS launched the Amazon Machine Learning service in April 2015 to help developers create
machine learning models. Then in 2016 it announced three new machine learning services for
image recognition (AWS Rekognition), text to speech deep learning models (Polly) and the
engine that powers Alexa (Lex).

Read next: AWS announces three new AI and machine learning services for customers:
Amazon AI availability and pricing

Google offers a Cloud Machine Learning Engine, which helps machine learning engineers build
models based on its open source TensorFlow deep learning library. Google also offers a whole
host of off-the-shelf APIs for things like natural language processing, translation and computer
vision.

Microsoft's Azure Machine Learning Studio allows specialist developers to write, test and deploy
algorithms, as well as a marketplace for off-the-shelf APIs.

The recent buzz around containers is catered for too, with all three providers supporting Docker
services.

All three providers take a pretty open approach to partnerships, allowing customers to run
various apps and services in their cloud environments.

Google, for example, has announced a range of key partnerships with established vendors like
SAP, Pivotal and Rackspace. Read next: Google courts enterprise customers with SAP,
Pivotal and Rackspace partnerships

For UK customers worried about data sovereignty, AWS launched its UK region in December
2016, with Microsoft and Google quickly following suit.
Compute, storage, databases and networking
For compute, AWS’ main offering is its EC2 instances, which can be tailored with a large
number of options. It also provides related services such as Elastic Beanstalk for app
deployment, the EC2 Container service, AWS Lambda and Autoscaling.

Meanwhile, Azure's compute offering is centred around its Virtual Machines (VMs), with other
tools such as Cloud Services and Resource Manager to help deploy applications on the cloud,
and its Azure Autoscaling service.

Google's scalable Compute Engine delivers VMs in Google's data centres. They are quick to
boot, come with persistent disk storage, promise consistent performance and are highly
customisable depending on the needs of the customer.

All three cloud providers support relational databases - that's Azure SQL Database, Amazon
Relational Database Service, Redshift and Google Cloud SQL) - as well as NoSQL databases
with Azure DocumentDB, Amazon DynamoDB and Google Bigtable.

Read next: Best cloud-based relational database options for the enterprise

AWS storage includes its Simple Storage (S3), Elastic Block Storage (EBS), Elastic File System
(EFS), Import/Export large volume data transfer service, Glacier archive backup and Storage
Gateway, which integrates with on-premise environments.

Microsoft’s offerings include its core Azure Storage service, Azure Blob block storage, as well
as Table, Queue and File storage. It also offers Site Recovery, Import Export and Azure Backup.

All three typically offer excellent networking capabilities with automated server load balancing
and connectivity to on-premise systems.

Pricing
Pricing can be a huge attraction for those considering a move to the cloud, and with good reason:
there has been a continued downward trend on prices for some time now as the big providers
compete. See also: Making sense of public cloud pricing: What does the cloud ‘pricing war’
mean for CIOs in 2016?

In general terms prices are roughly comparable, especially since AWS shifted from by-the-hour
to by-the-second pricing for its EC2 and EBS services in the Autumn of 2017, bringing it into
line with Azure and Google.

However, making a clear comparison can be tough as all three offer slightly different pricing
models, discounts and make frequent price cuts.

AWS provides a price calculator here, Microsoft here and Google here.
All vendors offer free introductory tiers before beginning to charge customers, and typically
offer credits to attract innovative startups onto their platforms.

Customers
A high-profile user base may not be the main reason for choosing your cloud provider, but it can
help more cautious organisations understand how the public cloud is benefiting others in their
sector.

This is clearly a strong point of AWS. It has increasingly taken on large customer deals. For
example, although the US Central Intelligence Agency eventually signed a contract with IBM, it
awarded AWS a contract to build its private cloud in a one-off deal in 2013, which could be seen
as a symbolic moment for potential buyers.

A longstanding AWS customer is Netflix, which eventually decided to shut all of its data centres
in a final move to the cloud in 2016. But aside from web pioneers, AWS has been truly
successful in convincing more traditional businesses to move to the cloud.

Other major customers include: AstraZeneca, NewsCorp, AirBnB, Aon, Channel 4, Financial
Times, Dow Jones, Kurt Geiger, Lonely Planet, Nasdaq, Nike, Nisa Retail, Pfizer, and the Royal
Opera House. A full list of AWS customers can be seen here.

Read next: Wall Street regulator Finra goes ‘all in’ on the public cloud with AWS

Microsoft perhaps has less high profile Azure users, with most of the messaging from the vendor
appearing to be around its widely used software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools. But the Redmond firm
has also notched up some notable customer wins such as Pearson, Ford, NBC News and Easyjet,
to name but a few.

In a bid to turn this around Microsoft cut around ten percent of its global sales force in July 2017,
as part of a broad reorganisation to focus on selling its cloud services under the Azure brand.

The new selling strategy at the company was revealed in a leaked email, which was obtained by
the Wall Street Journal. In it, Judson Althoff, executive vice president for worldwide commercial
business, outlined how Microsoft wants to focus on targeting businesses instead of specific
industries or market segments. He said he wanted to increase the “technical depth and better
align sales and services to solution areas” at the company.

Google is in a similar position, but has notched up some key wins in recent years. UK bank
HSBC has opted for Google Cloud for its analytics and machine learning capabilities. However,
HSBC is taking a clear multi-cloud approach, partnering with all three providers for different
workloads.

Read next: HSBC turns to Google Cloud for analytics and machine learning capabilities
Snapchat parent company Snap also spends a great deal with Google for IaaS, but it also spends
with AWS. During the social network's IPO process it was revealed that the company is
committed to a $2 billion five-year deal with Google for cloud services, as well as a $1 billion
deal with AWS over five years.

Home Depot and Disney were also named as Cloud Platform customers during Google's 2017
Cloud Next conference.

Read next: Majority of new core banking projects will be in the public cloud 'by 2020', says
Temenos

AWS pros and cons

As mentioned before, the reasons for picking one vendor over another will differ for each
customer. But there are aspects of the competing clouds that will offer benefits in certain
circumstances.

The breadth and depth of the AWS offering is seen as a plus for AWS.

Read next: The history of AWS: A timeline of 12 defining moments from 2002 to now

AWS had a head start on the competition, building out its suite of cloud services since 2006. All
of these are built to be enterprise-friendly so that they will appeal to CIOs as well as its core
audience of developers.

The vendor ranks highly on platform configuration options, monitoring and policy features,
security and reliability. Its partner ecosystem and general product strategy are also seen as
market leading, and its AWS Marketplace has a large number of third-party software services.

Another of the benefits of the AWS cloud is its openness and flexibility. For example, Transport
for London - which also relies on Azure in other parts of its operations - has used AWS to meet
spikes in demand for its online services such as its Journey Planner tool.

However, one area AWS falls short to some degree is with its hybrid cloud strategy. Unlike
Microsoft, AWS has tended to be dismissive of the benefits of on-premise private clouds. Many
organisations prefer to keep sensitive data within their own data centres - such as those in the
financial sector - using public clouds for other purposes.

At the same time, this clearly has not deterred many customers from using AWS as part of their
cloud strategy, regardless of whether they plan to move all systems to the cloud or not.

Another downside to AWS is the scale of its offering. While this is an attraction in many senses,
it can be difficult at times to navigate the large numbers of features that are on offer, and some
see AWS as being a complex vendor to manage.
Azure pros and cons
The big pull for Azure is where Microsoft already has a strong footing within an organisation
and can easily play a role in helping those companies transition to the cloud. Azure naturally
links well with key Microsoft on-premise systems such as Windows Server, System Center and
Active Directory.

In addition, while both AWS and Azure have PaaS capabilities, this is a particular strength of
Microsoft’s.

One of the downsides, however, has been a series of outages over the years. Gartner analyst
Lydia Leong has recommended considering disaster recovery capabilities away from Azure for
critical applications hosted in the cloud. AWS isn't immune to downtime, though, suffering a
major S3 outage of its own in March 2017.

As part of its 2017 IaaS global Magic Quadrant, Gartner states that its clients have had issues
with "technical support, documentation, training and breadth of the ISV partner ecosystem" - but
the company has been steadily working on these areas.

Whereas AWS provides users with many options for supporting other platforms, Azure can be
somewhat restrictive in comparison. If you want to run anything other than Windows Server then
Azure might not be the best solution, but Microsoft has been willing to embrace open source
platforms, if a little slowly. For example, the company has been busy extending its support for
Linux operating systems in 2017.

Google Cloud Platform pros and cons

Google has a good track record with innovative cloud-native companies and has a good standing
in the open source community, but has traditionally struggled to break into the enterprise market.

Its go-to-market strategy has been focused on proving itself on smaller, innovative projects at
large organisations, rather than becoming a strategic cloud partner. Increasing the breadth of its
partnerships and supporting pre-cloud businesses and IT processes will need to become focus
areas if it wants to attract more traditional enterprises.

The company is certainly betting big on its machine learning tools, with the company's internal
AI expertise and popular TensorFlow framework as selling points in what is set to become a key
battleground.

Read next: How Google plans to bring AI and machine learning to the enterprise

It has also proved itself more than an AWS copycat, launching innovative features in the
machine learning space as well as its BigQuery analytics engine, and the Cloud Spanner
distributed database.
It is also worth noting that Google has the smallest footprint of global instances of the big three.

Verdict
In very broad terms, AWS continues to lead the way in terms of offering the widest range of
functionality and maturity. It continues to be the clear market leader, but the gap is closing.

Its expansive list of tools and services, along with its enterprise-friendly features make it a strong
proposition for large organisations. Meanwhile its huge and continuously growing infrastructure
provides economies of scale that enable aggressive price cuts.

But it appears that Microsoft has started to bridge the gap between the two, and will continue to
do so with its ongoing investment in building out the Azure cloud platform and further plans to
strengthen ties with its on-premise software.

For organisations already heavily invested heavily in Microsoft in terms of technology and
developer skills - of which there are undoubtedly many - Microsoft Azure will continue to be a
strong proposition.

Then there is Google, which offers a slightly different proposition. It is making good progress
with certain customers but has much more work to do to prove itself a viable enterprise option.

It may end up carving a niche out for itself in advanced use cases around big data and machine
learning, but whether it is ready to cede the core IaaS market to its two biggest rivals is another
matter.