AWS vs. Azure， Which family is strong from nine aspects
With the advent of the heyday of cloud computing, the major cloud service providers are constantly making breakthroughs to consolidate their dominance in this field. From the perspective of market share and use promotion degree, AWS and Azure have become undisputed leaders in this field. Hong Kong server However, for users of cloud services, what bothers them most is how to select the one that best suits their business needs from a large number of cloud service providers.
In this article, we will compare the two cloud service giants in an all-round way to help you make a better comprehensive choice.
AWS and Azure: General Features
First, we make a macro comparison between AWS and Azure from five dimensions: release year, market share, open source status, hybrid cloud features, licenses, and Linux ecosystem. The following table provides an overview of these aspects:
On the basis of the above characteristics, let's compare the product pricing of the two.
1. Pricing
As the leading provider of cloud services, the pricing models of Azure and AWS follow the classic cloud computing price architecture, that is, pay as you go. Specifically, AWS charges users by hour, while Azure charges users by minute. Therefore, for short-term subscription plans, Azure provides you with greater flexibility. Of course, it is worth noting that for some service applications of users, when their architecture needs to be extended, their spending on the Azure platform is often more expensive than AWS.
2. Computing services
Computing capacity and computing services can be described as one of the core reference indicators of cloud service delivery platform. At present, various cloud service applications are constantly and frequently generating massive data. Therefore, platform users need faster processing resources provided by the cloud platform. Accordingly, computing services can be used to measure and ensure that users can generate different instances within a few minutes, and expand new instances as needed. Next, let's take a look at how AWS and Azure meet these needs.
At present, AWS has EC2 and Elastic Beanstalk（ https://www.edureka.co/blog/introduction-to-amazon-elastic-beanstalk/ )、 AWS Lambda( https://www.edureka.co/blog/aws-lambda-tutorial ）, and ECS. Similar services that Azure can provide include: Azure Virtual Machine, App Service, Azure Functions and Container Services. So obviously, the two are on a par in terms of computing services.
However, when you look at the cost, you will find that various instances of Azure tend to become more and more expensive with the increase of its system capacity. For example, if you have an instance with 256GB RAM and 64 bit CPU, AWS will charge $3.20 per hour, while Azure will charge $6.76 per hour.
Above, we discussed and compared the computing capabilities of the two platforms. Next, we will compare their data storage capabilities.
3. Storage service
AWS and Azure can both provide long-term reliable storage services. AWS has AWS S3, EBS and Glacier（ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcYutDorr2Q ）Azure storage services include Blob storage, disk storage and standard archive.
AWS S3 can ensure high availability and automatic replication across regions. When dealing with temporary storage requirements, AWS will run immediately each time the instance is started; And end the service when the instance stops, so as to realize block storage similar to hard disk. Therefore, it can not only connect to any EC2 instance, but also maintain its own independence.
Azure provides temporary storage and page blob storage for VM volume. As the corresponding option of AWS S3, Azure also has the option of block storage. In addition, Azure can also provide cold storage and hot storage options.
After discussing storage, let's take a look at the performance of two service providers in database services.
4. Database service
Today, many enterprises can provide diversified services through cloud platforms after "going to the cloud", and thus generate data in a variety of different formats. Therefore, in order to preserve these data, the databases of various cloud platforms are naturally constantly following up and developing. Therefore, AWS and Azure can handle all kinds of structured and unstructured data by providing different types of database services.
If you pay attention to database persistence, AWS has Amazon RDS, while Azure has Azure SQL Server database. Specifically, Amazon RDS can support different database engines, including MariaDB, Amazon Aurora, MySQL, Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. For Azure, as the name implies, SQL Server databases are certainly SQL based.
5. Service interface
Let's consider their interfaces again. Azure has a friendly and smooth user interface, while AWS provides more optional instances. It can be seen that these two tools have their own advantages.
6. Scope of Services
From the perspective of their service coverage, they can support data analysis and big data services. AWS has EMR（ https://www.edureka.co/community/20202/how-to-launch-and-configure-an-emr-cluster-using-boto ）Azure also has a similar product - HD Insights. In addition, Azure also provides Cortana Intelligence Suite with Hadoop, Spark, Storm and HBase.
In terms of software maturity, AWS also provides a more mature environment for big data.
7. Network service
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) supports the creation of mutually isolated networks in the cloud space. From this, users can create various subnets, routing tables, private IP address segments and different gateways.
As the echo of VPC, Microsoft Azure Virtual Network can let you get all the functions of VPC perfectly. In addition, these two service providers also provide solutions to extend the internally deployed data center to the cloud and configure cloud firewall options.
8. Container and orchestration support
As mentioned earlier, AWS can provide more mature big data analysis services. Its tool spectrum covers many fields, including the Internet of Things, the development of mobile applications, and the creation of computing environments according to needs. Of course, they can also support Docker.
Because services such as Azure HD Insight can support Hadoop, Microsoft is a bit better at this aspect. Azure on Windows Server 2016 can also provide integration with Docker for various Windows containers and Hyper-V containers. Of course, on this platform, we can run both Windows containers and Linux containers.
9. Compliance
Amazon has established good relations with US government agencies and supports various government cloud products. At the same time, they also provide good security measures to ensure that individual users can access the corresponding cloud space in an appropriate way. Obviously, this is crucial for the company to properly handle sensitive data.
Microsoft provides more than 50 compliance products, including the famous ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations), DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency), HIPAA, CJIS (Criminal Justice Information Services) and FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards of the United States), Federal Information Processing Standards)。 Therefore, they are equally matched in terms of security.
Final score
To sum up, AWS and Azure are two cloud platforms that can provide comprehensive functions and services. It is difficult for us to say which is stronger and more advanced arbitrarily. Azure is excellent in hybrid cloud and integration with Microsoft full stack products, while AWS has more flexibility and some additional functions. All in all, you should still depend on the specific needs of your organization.
