Microsoft Azure or AWS – The updated cloud comparison guide (2018)
Microsoft Azure or AWS?
Before I tell you about which one to pick (it’s not an easy choice anyway), we need to first understand that to succeed the digital transformation movement, an enterprise must have a solid cloud foundation. Cloud is one of the most critical pillars that can help enterprises to lead digital transformation race. Emerging technologies such as IoT, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and cloud computing, which define digital transformation, are together turning multi-cloud theory into a reality.
It is expected that in a digital transformation economy, hybrid and multi-cloud architectures will lead, and enterprises will work towards building cloud-enabled services for specific activity.
Primarily, there are some core components that both Microsoft Azure and AWS’s public cloud offerings include, and these are self-service and instant provisioning, Auto-scaling, security, compliance, identity management, and the popular breakdown includes compute, storage and networking.
However, in the recent times, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, are the key factors to decide if Microsoft Azure or AWS is the right choice for you.
IaaS will be a continued advantage to Azure as Microsoft is gaining a huge ground in this area. The introduction of Azure stack has made Microsoft well suited to design around services that can benefit from hybrid cloud. To be fair, we are comparing some top areas that can be used for a comparison between Microsoft Azure and AWS. To pick the better one, well, it is not a conclusive debate but one that depends on the primary needs of the enterprise.
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The following areas are comparison points between AWS and Azure.
1. Features
AWS largely covers the large set of resources that even Microsoft Azure offers. As far as features are concerned, the deciding factors like scalability and revenue potential make Azure to be better suited to the enterprise requirements.
It’s best to take an opportunity and test the output from both Azure and AWS to decide which is the better suited. Amazon uses different codes and names to breakdown their cloud products, and these fall into different categories like Analytics, Applications Services, Database and Migration. Both the cloud providers are working hard to reach new markets with new areas of cloud computing interactions. There are several efforts to keep up with AI and Machine Learning trends.
Microsoft Azure is building an end to end platform that can deliver to the needs of its customers. Azure compared to AWS benefits from the heritage of enterprise computing when it comes to building modern and desired solutions. It includes creating Enterprise Agreements or EA. It includes earning benefits (like flexible billing and competitive pricing) from a committed usage of Azure.
As a business owner or CTO, you must ensure that you have a cloud strategy that responds to new products, and user requirements.
2. Hybrid Cloud
Hybrid cloud computing has become decisive to choose the right technology partner. There still are security concerns, which makes private cloud and on-premises data center to be a viable option. Microsoft Azure has a stronger hand when it comes to offering scalability and security.
The newly released Microsoft Azure Stack offers perfect accompaniment for enterprises that require private data centers. AWS has realized that hybrid cloud is suited to a certain set of enterprises. The long-term strategy caters to an unbelievably large set of processes and must adopt hybrid approach.
The ability for Azure and AWS to manage multi-cloud strategies and promote enterprises to adopt it at small scale is important.
3. Developers
Azure and AWS are prepared to deal with high pressure that developers bring. Azure features like Service Fabric and Container Services are great to deploy, create and scale applications. AWS conquered a large market share as it offers the option to migrate large quantities of data to the cloud.
AWS will adopt current ecosystems and integrate with most providers including Microsoft.
AWS and Azure are toe-to-toe. You can speak to one of our experts if you’re not sure the better choice for your business.
