Difference Between Azure and AWS (with Comparison Chart) -Tech Differences

Azure Vs AWS We are aware of cloud computing, and the services that the cloud provides, and if you have no idea about it, you may refer previous articles provided in the website to understand it better. In this article, we will be discussing the two types of cloud services, Azure and AWS. The significant difference between Azure and AWS is that the Azure is a Microsoft based cloud service while AWS stands for Amazon Web Services; hence, it is Amazon based service.

The computing resources that the AWS uses is EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) where thousands of processing nodes (computers) are used to perform calculations, processing and computation over the data. Inversely, Microsoft Azure uses a virtual machine for the same.

Content: Azure Vs AWS

Comparison Chart

Basis for comparison	Azure	AWS
Computation	Uses virtual machines	Uses EC2
Storage	Uses blocks	Uses S3
Networking	Virtual network	Virtual private cloud
Apps deployment	Can be easily deployed	Quite difficult
Database	Azure uses SQL databases, MySQL, PostgreSQL and CosmosDB.	AWS uses RDS and DynamoDB.
Open source development	Good	Better platform
Cost	Comparatively expensive	Moderate

Definition of Azure and

Microsoft Azure is a cloud-based data centre in which developers can store their applications. The major tasks performed by the Microsoft Azure platform is to maintain the servers, database software, operating systems, and other supporting applications. It is a platform used by developers to transfer their applications to the cloud. Microsoft Azure is far more than just a web server which only provides support for simple HTML pages because it offers operating system support for .NET applications and cloud-based SQL server.

The Microsoft Azure environment grows according to the developer’s application to satisfy the developer’s requirement in terms of users, processor demands, or disk storage. The Azure operating system is considered as the primary element of the company’s Azure platform services, which also contain the individual application, storage, security and virtualization service layers and desktop development environment. Virtual machines in Azure are offered in two varieties – basic tiers and standard tier.

Features

So, the Azure provides the below-given features:

Scalability: The scaling over the processor and storage resources is on demand, which means that according to the demand of the users, the resources can be increased or decreased.
Redundancy: It also offers server, disk storage and network redundancy. In simple words, there is more than one alternative for the server, disk storage and network redundancy.
Cost benefits from resource pooling: Mircosoft azure is capable of sharing IT resources across numerous companies which can limit the cost consumption.
Outsourced server management: There is a dedicated IT staff for maintaining the operating systems and underlying support software.
Low cost of entry: It is not necessary for the companies to invest in their own IT data centre if they want to release a cloud-based solution.

Azure Platform

The components included in the Microsoft Azure Platform are Microsoft Azure, SQL Azure, Microsoft Azure AppFabric, and Microsoft Azure Market Place.

Microsoft Azure is a Microsoft-based cloud service operating system supplies an on-demand compute and storage services in order to run application and store data in Microsoft data centres.
SQL Azure provides a SQL server environment where support for Transact-SQL and synchronization of relational data over SQL and an on-premises SQL server.
In order to link Cloud and on-premise applications retrieved by HTTP REST API, Microsoft Azure AppFabric, which is a Cloud-based infrastructure, is used.
To make transactions over the Cloud-Based data and Microsoft Azure Applications, it uses an online service known as Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

Azure service architecture

It is a PaaS solution (i.e., Platform-as-a-Service) ⁬which allow a user to use the web APIs presented by Microsoft Azure to configure and employ Microsoft Azure services instead of directly accessing the administrative privileges to the underlying virtual infrastructure. Microsoft Azure uses a term role for signifying discrete scalable component constructed with managed code, and it supports three types of roles- web role, work role, and VM role.

Web Role: This role is customized for executing web applications.
Work Role: It helps in generalizing Microsoft application development, and designed to run a wide range of Microsoft-based code.
VM Role: It executes a Microsoft Server 2008 R2 image given by the user.

Definition of AWS

Amazon is one of the largest American electronics-commerce companies rooted in all over the world. In several years, Amazon has emerged as the leading company among the providers of the public cloud services. Previously, it has started as an online bookstore but later spread its business in several different zones. AWS (Amazon web services) is the name of the suite given to the cloud computing services provided by the Amazon, which helps the other organizations to host their own systems.

Amazon web services also provide a redundant, scalable and robust system architecture developed by the internal developers same as the Microsoft Azure.

AWS Platform

The fundamental tool used by the AWS is the EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) through which companies can use cloud-based services for their application on a rental basis. The EC2 allows the companies to pay for their usage (i.e., pay per use), according to the processing they need and scaling up and down to meet user demands.
In addition to the processing power of EC2, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides cloud-based data-storage facilities where users pay only for the data storage they consume. It also offers, virtual-network, e-commerce and database support capabilities.
The Amazon RDS is a web service that helps in the generation of the instances of MySQL, Oracle or Microsoft SQL server in the cloud. RDS permit developers to establish, operate and scale a relational database within the cloud.
Amazon SQS provides a very scalable and reliable hosted queue that stores the messages when it transferred from different components of the applications.
The service used for No-SQL database is known as DynamoDB, which is completely managed, scalable and efficient.

Key Differences Between Azure and AWS

For computing purpose, Microsoft Azure uses virtual machines and for managing the software in the docker container it uses container service (AKS) and docker container registry. On the other hand, AWS employs a magnificent set of computers which facilitates in the calculation, processing, and computing of the data. Scaling of processing nodes in AWS is easily obtained through EC2 according to requirement. It manages a software container with docker through ECS.
For storing data Azure uses storage blocks while AWS employs S3 service.
The virtual network connects the various components of the cloud service in Azure. As against, AWS relies on a virtual private cloud for networking.
Azure has multiple app deployment tools which make the work easier. Conversely, AWS also has solutions like Elastic Beanstalk, Batch, Lamda, but it doesn’t provide many features.
The database used by Azure are SQL, MySQL and, and for NoSQL it uses CosmosDB. On the contrary, AWS uses a relational database as a service by employing RDS and for NoSQL, Dynamo DB is used.
Microsoft Azure cloud service is quite costlier than Amazon AWS.

Conclusion

The Microsoft and Amazon cloud services Azure and AWS are popular for their respective features both have pros and cons according to the usage of their services. However, the AWS is more popular as it was introduced before the Azure in 2006 while Azure came in light in 2010.