Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's AWS are two of the top leading cloud providers. Amazon Web Services is operating officially since 2006 while his main competitor, Microsoft Azure, entered the market in 2010 offering out from AWS' shadow ever since. Whatever, these companies are both global titans but, while the question which of the two is better for my business? Is a simple one, the answer may be a little more complicated.

In broad strokes, both Amazon and Microsoft organize AWS' and Azure's respective features into similar groups: AWS' four core features consist of Compute, Storage & Content Delivery, Databases, and Networking, all operating under Amazon's extensive admin controls. Azure essentially covers these bases, too, including them into four categories: Build infrastructure, Develop modern applications, Gain insights from data, and Manage identity and access.

Now, let's look deeper at each one...

Amazon Web Services is the established favorite. Its own Hadoop framework called EMR, and it also offers Kinesis, which can process real-time data streams. It offers managed NoSQL and relational database services, many third-party integrations, and a strong encryption platform.

According to Gartner, AWS has five times the capacity of the next 14 largest competitors combined. It has an easy-to-use dashboard that makes it simple to scale up and down depending on resource needs, and you can also enable services like CloudWatch that will scale your capacity on-demand. Clearly AWS has the better family of third-party apps. However Azure is leveraging relationships with Microsoft partners to expand its own offerings.

Microsoft Azure primarily targets PaaS customers, although its IaaS is expanding. If your company is interested in hybrid cloud services, Microsoft will soon offer Azure Stack for on-premises private clouds that integrate seamlessly with Azure’s public cloud. In fact, Microsoft has built a great deal of Azure around the hybrid philosophy.

A hybrid cloud suggests that it's both possible, even desirable, to put one foot in the cloud while keeping the other one anchored to on-premises data centers. Developers may also appreciate another advantage of the hybrid cloud. With a hybrid cloud, apps can live on both local servers and in the Azure cloud. Amazon is at least testing the waters of a hybrid cloud approach, but for the time being, Azure's hybrid capabilities are well ahead.

With Azure, developers worry only about maintaining their code. They don’t have to maintain their own VMs or worry about patches and security updates. Further, for developers familiar with Windows, Azure’s interface is modern, familiar, and easy to use.

About licensing mobility

Paying to use either IaaS is expected, but as you know, depending on the size of your enterprise, thousands of dollars in software licenses can be in play. Don't worry. In an effort to stay competitive with each other's' service, both Microsoft and Amazon offer license mobility to allow you to run instances of certain software in the cloud without buying additional licenses. Both vendors outline the process on their respective sites.

In addition, both services offer free trials for testing the arrays of products. As for pricing or price comparisons between the two services, there is no particular set menu of prices available, but both companies provide service calculators to estimate your costs very closely.

Our conclusion

AWS tends to be the least expensive option if you’re willing to shave off some of the costs by purchasing reserved instances up front instead of only committing to hourly rates. AWS charges extra for optional tasks which can make billing and budgeting complicated, and it requires extensive cloud architecture knowledge to get started. Still, AWS offers a huge partner ecosystem and incomparable scalability. If you have a lot of cloud knowledge in-house, AWS can be a great choice.

If you want seamless hybrid cloud, or you’re heavily invested in other Microsoft offerings and applications go with Azure, it offers seamless integration for your applications. Also, any changes to Azure’s SLA are announced at least 90 days in advance.

If you have a project coming up that you want to implement on any of these 2 solutions, feel free to contact us. We will be happy to help your business deploy.

About Facundo Lavallen

Facundo is a Software Engineer with more than 10 years of experience developing Web applications for some of the most important Fortune 500 companies

Nowadays Facundo works at the Engineering department of TISA, looking for implementing the latest technologies and frameworks to be used in future projects.

Beyond his technical knowledge and passion for the technology Facundo enjoys playing Ping-Pong, Soccer and Paddle.