AWS vs Azure
AWS and Azure are leading cloud providers with broad and deep set of capabilities.
This post compares the services at very high level for each capability. Not every AWS or Azure service is listed and not every matched service has exact feature-for-feature parity. Following are the categories of difference between aws and azure.
AWS Compute Services vs Azure Compute Services
| Category | AWS service | Azure service | Description |
| Virtual Servers | EC2 (Elastic Compute) Instances | Virtual Machines | Virtual servers allow users to deploy, manage, and maintain OS and server software. Instance types provide combinations of CPU/RAM. Users pay for what they use with the flexibility to change sizes. |
| AWS Batch | Azure Batch | Run large-scale parallel and high-performance computing applications efficiently in the cloud. | |
| AWS Auto Scaling | Azure Virtual machine scale sets | Allows you to automatically change the number of VM instances. You set defined metric and thresholds that determine if the platform adds or removes instances. | |
| VMware Cloud on AWS | Azure VMware Solution | Seamlessly move VMware-based workloads from your datacenter to Azure and integrate your VMware environment with Azure. Keep managing your existing environments with the same VMware tools you already know while you modernize your applications with Azure native services. Azure VMware Solution is a Microsoft service, verified by VMware, that runs on Azure infrastructure. | |
| AWS ParallelCluster | Azure CycleCloud | Create, manage, operate, and optimize HPC and big compute clusters of any scale | |
| Containers | Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) AWS Fargate | Container Instances | Azure Container Instances is the fastest and simplest way to run a container in Azure, without having to provision any virtual machines or adopt a higher-level orchestration service. |
| Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) | Azure Container Registry | Allows customers to store Docker formatted images. Used to create all types of container deployments on Azure. | |
| Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) | Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) | Deploy orchestrated containerized applications with Kubernetes. Simplify monitoring and cluster management through auto upgrades and a built-in operations console. | |
| AWS App Mesh | Service Fabric Mesh | Fully managed service that enables developers to deploy microservices applications without managing virtual machines, storage, or networking. | |
| Serverless | AWS Lambda | Azure Functions | Integrate systems and run backend processes in response to events or schedules without provisioning or managing servers. |
AWS Big data & Analytics Services vs Azure Big data & Analytics Services
| Category | AWS service | Azure service | Description |
| Data warehouse | Amazon Redshift | Synapse Analytics | Cloud-based enterprise data warehouse (EDW) that uses massively parallel processing (MPP) to quickly run complex queries across petabytes of data. |
| Big Data Processing | EMR | Azure Data Explorer | Fully managed, low latency, distributed big data analytics platform to run complex queries across petabytes of data. |
| EMR Spark | Databricks | Apache Spark-based analytics platform. | |
| EMR Hadoop | HDInsight | Managed Hadoop service. Deploy and manage Hadoop clusters . | |
| EMR Data lake | Data Lake Storage | Massively scalable, secure data lake functionality | |
| Time series | Amazon Timestream | Azure Data Explorer | Fully managed, low latency, and distributed big data analytics platform that runs complex queries across petabytes of data. Highly optimized for log and time series data. |
| Azure Time Series Insights | Open and scalable end-to-end IoT analytics service. Collect, process, store, query, and visualize data at Internet of Things (IoT) scale--data that's highly contextualized and optimized for time series. | ||
| ETL | Glue | Data Factory | Processes and moves data between different compute and storage services, as well as on-premises data sources at specified intervals. Create, schedule, orchestrate, and manage data pipelines. |
| Data Catalog & Governance | Glue Data Catalog | Azure Purview | A unified data governance service that helps you manage and govern your on-premises, multicloud, and software as a service (SaaS) data. |
| Analytics and visualization | Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics | Azure Stream Analytics Azure Data Explorer | Storage and analysis platforms that create insights from large quantities of data, or data that originates from many sources. |
| Amazon QuickSight | Power BI | Business intelligence tools that build visualizations, perform ad hoc analysis, and develop business insights from data. | |
| Amazon CloudSearch | Azure Cognitive Search | Delivers full-text search and related search analytics and capabilities. | |
| Amazon Athena | Data Lake Analytics | Provides a serverless interactive query service that uses standard SQL for analyzing databases. | |
| Azure Synapse Analytics | Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless or dedicated resources at scale. | ||
| Amazon OpenSearch | Elastic on Azure | Use the Elastic Stack (Elastic, Logstash, and Kibana) to search, analyze, and visualize in real time. |
AWS Machine Learning Services vs Azure Machine Learning Service
| Category | AWS service | Azure service | Description |
| Machine Learning | Amazon SageMaker | Azure Machine Learning | A cloud service to train, deploy, automate, and manage machine learning models. |
AWS AI Services vs Azure AI Services
| Category | AWS service | Azure service | Description |
| AI | Amazon Polly | Azure Speech Services | Enables both Speech to Textcapabilities |
| Amazon Transcribe | Azure Speech Services | Enables both Text to Speech capabilities | |
| Amazon Lex | Language Understanding (LUIS) | Enables both Speech to Textcapabilities | |
| Amazon Rekognition | Computer Vision | Extract information from images to categorize and process visual data. | |
| Face | Detect, identify, and analyze faces and facial expressions in photos. | ||
| Alexa Skills Kit | Virtual Assistant | The Virtual Assistant Template brings together a number of best practices we've identified through the building of conversational experiences and automates integration of components that we've found to be highly beneficial to Bot Framework developers. |
AWS Database Services vs Azure Database Services
| Category | AWS service | Azure service | Description |
| Relational database | Amazon RDS | Azure SQL Database | Managed relational database services in which resiliency, scale and maintenance are primarily handled by the Azure platform. |
| Azure Database for MySQL | |||
| Azure Database for PostgreSQL | |||
| Azure Database for MariaDB | |||
| Serverless relational database | Amazon Aurora Serverless | Azure SQL Database serverless | Database offerings that automatically scales compute based on the workload demand. You're billed per second for the actual compute used (Azure SQL)/data that's processed by your queries (Azure Synapse Analytics Serverless). |
| Serverless SQL pool in Azure Synapse Analytics | |||
| NoSQL | Amazon DynamoDB | Azure Cosmos DB | Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database that natively supports multiple data models including key-value pairs, documents, graphs and columnar. |
| Amazon SimpleDB | |||
| Document | Amazon DocumentDB | Azure Cosmos DB | scalable, highly durable, and fully managed database service for operating mission-critical MongoDB workloads. |
| Caching | Amazon ElastiCache | Azure Cache for Redis | An in-memory–based, distributed caching service that provides a high-performance store typically used to offload nontransactional work from a database. |
| Database migration | AWS Database Migration Service | Azure Database Migration Service | A service that executes the migration of database schema and data from one database format to a specific database technology in the cloud. |
Which is better aws or azure
AWS is leading cloud provider closely followed by Azure. As per Q4 2021, AWS has around 33% share followed by Azure at 21%. Below shows the top cloud providers
Choosing a cloud provider depends on your organizations requirements. If you company is a big Microsoft Customer with many of the Microsoft services, it makes sense to use Azure. AWS is recommended if your organization is not tied up with any other vendor due to its wide variety of services, excellent customer support and pricing model. You can also think about multi cloud stragegy.