In the battle of the cloud computing platforms, there are two standout opponents that draw great appeal from small businesses through to massive enterprise: AWS and Azure. In one corner, we have AWS, Amazon Web Services, the behemoth that a huge number of businesses run many parts of their infrastructure on. In the other corner is Azure, Microsoft’s competitor offering.
Both are widely utilized in the software space, for development, testing, lifecycle management, through to running services for end users.
Both of these platforms offer a wide range of services, but which one is the right fit for what?
Today we take a closer look at both platforms and how they stack up.
AWS
AWS offers a huge range of cloud services, including storage, compute, virtual networking, IT infrastructure, content delivery, backups, application development and deployment, DevOps, and more.
Pros
●First to market with a more comprehensive range of cloud platform options, particularly for developers.
●Developer-focused from the outset
●More highly configurable; better choice of options within products
●Plenty of online resources and AWS documentation to help with setting things up and running them, tutorials, courses, etc.
●Larger community, which means more help and other AWS users to chat with about sticking points (and finding answers to tricky questions), as well as influence Amazon in their product updates and new product offerings
Cons
●Some comparable services in AWS have a pay by the hour pricing model to Azure’s pay by the minute
●Built on Linux, with open source in mind, so pure Windows businesses may be more drawn towards Azure
Azure
Pros
●Works smoothly when transitioning from Windows-based environments to cloud services, unsurprisingly
●Useful for developers with a pure Windows development stack (e.g. .NET, Visual Studio, SQL Server, etc.)
●Easier to navigate, particularly the management portal
●Greater PaaS (Platform as a Service) offerings
Cons
●Microsoft in general gained a bad reputation in the 90s for being closed platform with their development services. For many, the sentiment still remains, driving them towards AWS.
●Service offering still lacks the breadth and depth of AWS
●Reportedly it can be difficult getting support, depending on what package/s you are subscribed to - this is obviously different if you are subscribed to high-level enterprise support
The future of AWS and Azure
While Azure still appears to trail behind AWS is the battle of the cloud platform providers, they are fast making up ground. In the RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report from Flexera, they note that “overall Azure adoption grew from 45 to 52 percent to narrow the gap with AWS. As a result, Azure adoption has now reached 85 percent of AWS adoption, up from 70 percent last year.”
Both cloud platform providers are only just really getting started. With new service offerings and service upgrades for each provider happening at a lightning rate, there will be plenty to see from both competitors over the next 5 years.
The bottom line
Both AWS and Azure offer a huge range of services, and it’s simply a matter of knowing exactly what your business needs and for what. And that doesn’t mean choosing just one or the other.
Because it’s 2019, you don’t have to choose just one public cloud platform. In fact, in the report we mentioned above, it was found that respondents utilize an average of 3.4 public cloud providers on average, and are experimenting with 1.5 more.
While sticking with just AWS or just Azure makes things a little easier from an interoperability perspective, plenty of companies combine different public cloud service offerings to make up their ideal tech stack - it just takes a little longer to configure is all. There’s also Google Cloud, IBM, Alibaba another competitor offerings to throw into the mix. Each may have a particular product you’re dying to add to a project - which you’re able to, when managed correctly and efficiently.
At CodeFirst, we take a look at system requirements before converging on the right set of products for a project. Each project that we come across is unique and requires a unique configuration, so it’s our mandate to find the best fit for the job. Reach out to us to learn more about which cloud platform provider/s will be a good fit for your upcoming development project.