5 Reasons Why Azure Is Better than AWS
Every cloud platform has its strengths and weaknesses, and the use cases for which it is best suited. This is also the case with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, the leading providers of cloud services according to Gartner’s magic quadrant.
For Azure, this is a real breakthrough, considering that Azure entered the market 4 years after the mature AWS, and in less than a decade has grown to compete for the market leadership. Azure’s popularity lies in its computing strength and flexibility. In this article, I aim to show you why Azure is an overall better option than AWS. Read on to find out more.
Azure Overview
Azure is Microsoft’s public cloud computing platform, providing an array of cloud services including computing, analytics, storage and network. It is flexible and scalable, allowing users to customize their solution by choosing from the services and scale or run applications in the public cloud. It offers both a Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution.
Microsoft Azure cloud services are divided into 18 main categories, and among them:
- Compute — deploys and manages Virtual Machines (VMs) and containers, and supports batch processing.
- Data storage — provides scalable cloud storage, supporting big data, persistent data and archival.
- Analytics — provides distributed analytics, as well as features for big data analytics, data lakes, machine learning, and business intelligence.
- Web — the platform offers features for content delivery, development and deployment of web applications and application programming interface (API) management.
- Networking — it offers virtual networks, services for traffic management and diagnostics, load balancing, domain name system (DNS) hosting, network protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks.
- Backup and recovery — including server backup, site recovery and hybrid integration, connecting private and public clouds.
- Development — supporting most programming languages, including JavaScript, Phyton, .NET and Node.js.
Other services include identity and access management, database-as-a-service (DBaaS) artificial intelligence and machine learning, security and containerization, using common platforms as Docker and Kubernetes.
5 Reasons Why Azure Is Better than AWS
Now let’s review a few reasons why Azure is a better choice for your cloud operations, followed by a short comparison on the key points of Azure vs AWS.
#1. Developer-friendly design
As far as PaaS platforms are concerned, Azure is considered a faster and stronger platform than its competitors, facilitating design and development and supporting DevOps models. Moreover, Azure users can benefit from having Microsoft in the backstage taking care of the infrastructure management. Reliable and efficient PaaS services are the backbone of an efficient cloud infrastructure and Azure seems to be leading the market in both.
#2. Innovation-driven and customizable
Microsoft adds new features constantly to keep up the platform a step ahead. Furthermore, it encourages users to choose the framework, programming language and features that best fit them, which makes the platform very flexible for a client migrating to it.
#3. Advanced tools
Microsoft Azure offers an Internet of Things (IoT) suite, which provides remote monitoring and predictive maintenance solutions. The developer tools include features to implement in your applications, such as streaming analytics, IoT deployments and machine learning.
#4. Secured service offerings
Azure provides advanced security technology with tools like threat intelligence, advanced threat analytics, Azure Information Protection and multi-factor authorization, allowing you to analyze threats in real time, responding quickly to suspicious activity.
The security of the Azure Cloud is rooted in the security development lifecycle, which integrates security across all stages of the development process. This helps developers build highly secure software, address security compliance requirements and reduce development costs.
#5. Better discounts and incentives with an enterprise agreement
Chances are that if your organization uses Microsoft software, (Windows, anyone?), then it has an enterprise agreement with Microsoft. This agreement allows your organization to benefit from significant discounts and incentives if moving to the Azure Cloud Platform.
Azure vs AWS Quick Comparison
Now let’s compare Azure with its main competitor, AWS. Both cloud services providers cover the basics of cloud computing, so what are the differences?
#1. Size
AWS, with over 1 million customers, is the biggest cloud computing platform, with 40 percent of the market share. Azure, on the other hand, is growing fast at a rate of about 120,000 customers per month, with 5 million organizations currently using the Azure Active directory.
#2. Compute
AWS offers EC2 instances, which provide scalable and customized computing. It also offers other computing services such as AWS Lambda, an EC2 container service and autoscaling.
The computing structure of Azure is somewhat different, depending on Virtual Machines (VMs), with the cloud services and the resource manager deploying applications in the cloud.
#3. PaaS capabilities
Both AWS and Azure offer similar PaaS capabilities for storage, virtual machines and networking. However, Azure provides a range of Dev-Ops connections that are critical for managing, monitoring and upgrading applications.
#4. Pricing
Both platforms have free tiers with limited usage options, with credits geared to attract start-ups.
Both have a pay-as-you-go model but Azure charges per minute while AWS charges per hour. However, AWS has a pricing structure that charges you less the more you use the platform. Azure is a bit more flexible, letting users choose if they want to be charged monthly or in advance (prepaid options).
#5. Databases
Azure provides an SQL server database, while AWS provides a relational database service (RDS). Both are highly durable and available, and both provide automatic replication. However, AWS offers analytic tools such as EMR that helps setting up EC2 clusters. It is flexible, working well both with relational databases and non-relational, which makes a good fit for working with big data.
On the other hand, Azure Table and Azure HDInsight support both relational and NoSQL databases, offering analytical products packaged in the Cortana Intelligence Suite. While AWS’ RDS supports database engines such as MariaDB, MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL, Azure SQL is based on the Microsoft SQL server.
#6. Storage and availability
Both cloud service providers offer very similar capabilities. However, Microsoft Azure offers hybrid solutions and PaaS, which benefit any organization in the process of migrating to the cloud. One of the strongest points of Azure is its extensive network of data centers, located around the world. This enables Azure to offer service-level agreements with 99.95% uptime.
Wrap Up
With more than half of Fortune 500 companies using Microsoft Azure for their cloud computing needs, and over 100,000 new customers a year, Azure is on the way to grabbing the leadership of the market. The benefits of this platform derive from the speed of its virtual machines, the scalable and durable cloud storage, and the backup and recovery solutions, which can be adapted to businesses of any size. In this article, I covered the five top reasons that more companies are choosing Azure for their cloud computing.
