AWS vs. Azure: What’s best for Your Organization?

Let’s talk about Cloud, and thus let’s talk about AWS and Azure. If a business is deciding where to hose a specific cloud workload, which service would be best? It is a choice that is made more interesting by the fact that an organization could really make the decision on a pre-workload basis, there is little need and truly less incentive to arbitrarily commit to one provider or another.

WHAT IS AWS?

AWS is Amazon Web Services. It is a secure cloud services platform, providing database storage, computer power, content delivery and other functions to help companies grow and scale. Currently, there are millions of customers that are leveraging AWS products and solutions for building sophisticated apps with increased scalability, flexibility and reliability. In the year 2006, AWS started offering information technology infrastructure services to organizations in the form of web services, commonly known today as cloud computing. One of the main benefits of cloud computing is the chance to replace up-front expenses with low costs that scale with the business. With cloud, businesses need not plan for and procure servers and other IT infrastructure in week or months ahead. Rather, they could spin up thousands of servers in minutes and deliver faster results instantly.

AWS today offers highly scalable, reliable, low-cost infrastructure platform cloud which powers hundreds of thousands of companies in 190 countries worldwide. With data center locations in the United States, Europe, Singapore, Brazil, Australia and Japan, customers across all industries enjoy the many benefits that AWS cloud brings.

WHAT IS AZURE?

Azure is by Microsoft. It is a growing collection of integrated cloud services, computing, analytics, mobile, database, storage, networking and web to achieve more, faster and saving money. Any IT professional of developer could be productive with Azure. The pre-built templates, managed services and integrated tools make it easier to create and manage mobile, enterprise, web IoT applications faster, with skills that one already has and technologies that one knows already. Also, Microsoft is the only vendor positioned as the leader across the Magic Quadrants for Cloud Infrastructure as a service, app platform as a service and cloud storage services for two consecutive years. Azure supports the widest selection of programming languages, operating systems, databases and devices and tools.

WHAT DOES NOT MATTER IN TERMS OF AWS VERSUS AZURE

For most of the main factor that IT manages focus on, the cost and availability, neither AWS nor Azure provide a clear winner. Both are really close to similar. In some edge-case instances, one may have an edge over the other. For instance, AWS has a bit of different billing increments for virtual machine runtimes. Thus, for an on-and-off workloads, there is a pricing difference. Nevertheless, on the whole, the two are very, very similar.

AVAILABILITY OF SPECIFIC SERVICES

For specific service, such as Azure Active Directory, Elastic Beanstalk or whatever, one should of course go with the provider that provides it. Both do not provide an entirely equal set of offerings. But, it’s important to focus on the business requirement instead of the feature name. While Azure does not have something exactly like Elastic Beanstalk, it does provide a combination of services such as Azure Automation, which could more or less do what Elastic Beanstalk could. The key is to look at what one needs to do and determine which provider offers the best service to fit the need.

LOCATION

One of the current strengths of Microsoft is a huge network of data centers that are scattered throughout many of the major jurisdictions and countries in the world. Jurisdiction is vital for many businesses, who could have legal reasons to keep company and customer data, in a certain region or country. The wide network of datacenter helps provide more local egress points as well, which could boost the user-perceived performance of cloud-hosted services.

EASE OF MANAGEMENT

A team that is well-versed or certified in AWS of Azure management, there’s a strong reason to stick with that provider. However, and this is critical, it is not a good idea to allow the skills or familiarities of the team to bog the company down. Get the team to skill up if need be. Both AWS and Azure are conceptually similar enough that people could learn to manage both, which gives a business ultimate flexibility. Both provide APIs for easier automation and integration, both offer web-based management consoles and have decent documentation as well as a robust ecosystem of training options.

AWS or AZURE, WHICH SHOULD A BUSINESS CHOOSE?

The answer actually depends on the workload. It is not necessary to commit entirely to one or the other, and could in fact opt for the best-of-breed on a case to case basis.

The key to the decision whether to use Azure or AWS would depend on the workload. The cloud services are very similar, with only slight variations and could be used to their best advantage.