Before we understand these two cloud infrastructure providers, let us first know a little about these giants.
AWS: Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary of Amazon providing cloud computing platforms and infrastructure to companies, governments, and personal users based on various plans like pay as you go, etc. It was founded in 2006.
Azure: Microsoft owned cloud infrastructure and managed services for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers. It’s users also vary from companies, governments to personal users, and come with various payment schemes. It was released on 1st February 2010.
Now let’s go ahead and see what AWS and AZURE have to offer:
AWS: If you are looking for something on the more customized approach of power like the size of the RAM, Power of the processor, or the number of VMs, then AWS is the option to go for. Also, if one is opting for different regions or zones from where the server runs, AWS gives that option.
Azure: The User needs to configure the amount of processing cores and Memory size based on which a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) would be created, up and running.
AWS: It comes with a short-term storage facility that gets destroyed once a process or instance is terminated. It also comes with block storage similar to Hard Drive, which is detachable with any instances. It has facilities like Data Archiving and supports relational databases and Unstructured Databases and Bigdata.
Azure: It offers a temporary storage facility via D drive and detachable storage through Page Blobs. It has support for both Structured and Unstructured Databases through Azure Table and HDInsight. It also offers site recovery, Import-Export, and Azure Backup for additional archiving and recovery options.
AWS: Both government bodies and private entities have partnerships with AWS. It strictly follows compliance like ITAR, DISA, HIPAA, CJIS, FIPS, and more. They also have access restrictions so that only legitimate and authorized users can have access to sensitive data.
Azure: Their security complaints are within the 50 most sought after, which includes: ITAR, DISA, HIPAA, CJIS, FIPS. Their security is also robust, and not anyone can trespass it at ease.
AWS: They have a pay as you go model, where they charge per hour basis. Instances are purchasable on the following models:
Azure: Microsoft has flexibility between the pay-as-you-go model to pay-per-minute, which is more cost-effective. It has an option between prepaid or monthly charges.
AWS: A 100 TB hard drive for shifting workloads between cloud and client data centers. Snowball Edge added a much needed Hybrid capability with VMware to burst users into its cloud environment.
Azure: A full circle of Hybrid cloud services like Azure StorSimple, Hybrid SQL Server, and Azure Stack to bring their own on-premises data centers using the same pay-as-you-go pricing model for its public mode.
AWS uses a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) that allows users to create isolated private networks. It takes advantage of the API gateways for cross-premises connectivity. Load Balancing techniques are used for smooth operation during high usage time.
VPC comes with various options that give you the flexibility to create subnets, private IP ranges, route tables, and network gateways.
Azure makes use of the virtual networks that grant users the ability to create isolated networks, as well as subnets, private IP ranges, route tables, and network gateways.
If someone needs cross-network connectivity, one can go for the VPN gateway. Load Balancing is handled using a load balancing application gateway.
Although both offer top-notch services, and it is very hard to declare one the winner. But considering all the features and services offered by both Azure would be the option for the following reasons:
At INT. where we are the Gold Partner for Azure services, we have seen the growing computational power of this platform.
