Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are two of the biggest names in public cloud computing. Which one is right for you? To help you make that decision, let’s talk about what each provider brings to the public cloud table, and key differences between them.

    Compute power

AWS: AWS EC2 users can configure their own VMs or choose pre-configured machine images, or customize MIs. Users choose size, power, memory capacity and number of VMs, and choose from different regions and availability zones with which to launch from.

Azure: Azure users choose Virtual Hard Disk (VHD), which is equivalent to a Machine Instance, to create a VM. VHD can be pre-configured by Microsoft, the user or a third party. The user must specify the amount of cores and memory.

Storage

AWS: AWS has temporary storage that is allocated once an instance is started and destroyed when the instance is terminated. They also provide block storage (same as hard disks), that can be separate or attached to an instance. Object storage is offered with S3; and data archiving services with Glacier. Fully supports relational and NoSQL databases and Big Data.

Azure: Azure offers temporary storage through D drive, block storage through Page Blobs for VMs. Block Blobs and Files also serve as object storage. Supports relational databases; NoSQL and Big Data through Azure Table and HDInsight. Azure also offers site recovery, Import Export and Azure Backup for additional archiving and recovery options.