At first glance, the AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud platforms offer very similar capabilities in terms of on-demand computing, cloud storage, networking, and pricing. Both offer, among hundreds of services, flexible autoscaling, self-service resource provisioning, a pay-per-use pricing model, robust security information and event management (SIEM) solutions, and big data analysis tools. However, the devil is in the details, and AWS and Azure have slight asymmetries in the selection of the underlying technologies and in the capabilities offered. In this article, we'll compare the key capabilities of both cloud platforms and outline similarities and differences between the two CSPs to understand their strengths.
Cloud computing has evolved significantly in recent years, becoming an essential foundation for modern business operations, with 89% of businesses relying on multiple cloud computing services for their digital infrastructures.
Initially conceived to centralize data storage, the cloud world developed into a sophisticated and flexible ecosystem that allows businesses and individuals to access and use resources on demand without owning and maintaining physical infrastructure. This transformation allows companies to improve operational efficiency and effectiveness to unprecedented levels.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure they are currently the two cloud service providers (CSPs) that dominate the market and, according to current data from the Synergy Research Group, AWS holds 29% of the market and Microsoft Azure between 22 and 24%. Both recorded double-digit growth, with the current year's numbers continuing to follow this strong growth trend.
For many companies, there is no better time than now to embark on the journey to the cloud, but it is a choice that requires careful evaluation and, at the heart of this decision, is the crucial choice between these two platforms (both recognized as industry leaders) that have revolutionized the way in which organizations manage their digital infrastructure.
So, which one to choose?
The answer to these types of questions is, as always, a little more complicated than you think.
So let's get to the bottom of the matter.
Before we begin, let's take a quick look at cloud computing.
With cloud computing, the provision and execution of IT resources are managed over the internet, which means that organizations don't have to buy and maintain their own data centers and servers. Large cloud service providers, such as Microsoft and Amazon, offer a variety of managed cloud services that are fully or partially managed by the provider, reducing the workload of an organization's IT team.
These services include infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which represents the fundamental building blocks for a cloud-based IT environment, platform as a service (PaaS), which focuses on distributing and managing applications without the need to manage hardware and operating systems, and finally software as a service (SaaS), which provides a complete virtual product experience, fully managed by the software vendor.
In addition, cloud computing allows organizations to scale according to their needs, so if you need more computing power, more storage space or more databases, cloud computing allows you to get what you need easily and quickly.
Specifically, cloud computing allows organizations to:
At a general level, cloud computing performs the list of services mentioned above through a process called virtualization.
Virtualization means that the computing power needed to run an application, use a desktop, or host a website takes place entirely over the internet, with data centers and servers doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes to manage computing power, security, access, and user experience.
The main benefit of cloud computing for businesses is that they don't have to maintain their hardware, such as servers and databases, and can instead rely on cloud service providers to manage that infrastructure. For businesses using the cloud, this translates into cost savings, lower IT expenses, and more secure technical operations.
Let's start the comparison between Azure and AWS with a general look at the two CPS.
Microsoft Azure, originally launched as Windows Azure in 2010, emerged from Microsoft's internal initiative known as Project Red Dog. The goal was to build a first-rate cloud computing platform to compete with the then undisputed leader in the cloud industry, AWS.
The platform was designed to provide scalable computing resources and services, including virtual machines, storage, and databases, across Microsoft's global network of data centers.
Over time, Azure has evolved into a comprehensive cloud platform that offers infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, supporting a wide range of business and development needs around the world.
The idea for AWS cloud technology and services was born in the early 2000s from Amazon's internal need to manage its infrastructure more efficiently. Recognizing the potential to provide cloud computing services to a wide range of organizations beyond their own operations, Amazon's leadership developed and launched AWS as a strategic business unit.
This initiative aimed to offer scalable and reliable cloud services, leading AWS to become a dominant player in the cloud computing industry.
As the first major cloud provider, AWS gained a significant advantage by establishing early leadership in cloud computing. This has allowed AWS to pioneer many fundamental cloud services and to set industry standards.
Since its launch nearly two decades ago, AWS has evolved to meet the needs of millions of customers, resulting in an extended feature set for a wide range of use cases.
In the following table, we propose a comparison between the main services provided by both platforms, to begin to get an idea of the proposals put on the table by these two cloud giants:
We have created the Infrastructure & Security team, focused on the Azure cloud, to better respond to the needs of our customers who involve us in technical and strategic decisions. In addition to configuring and managing the tenant, we also take care of:
With Dev4Side, you have a reliable partner that supports you across the entire Microsoft application ecosystem.
Both AWS and Azure offer a complete suite of cloud services and solutions to meet the needs of individual companies, sometimes very similar to each other.
But, as always, the most important differences lie in the small details.
So let's see the main characteristics of each platform, examining their capabilities in different contexts, to try to understand what their strengths are.
Virtual machines (VMs) are software representations of physical computers that emulate traditional computing environments. They are widely used in cloud computing environments to efficiently allocate and manage computing resources, allowing businesses to dynamically deploy and scale applications without the constraints of physical hardware.
The virtual machine offering in AWS is called Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing), while the equivalent service in Azure is Azure Virtual Machine (VMs). Both services offer virtual servers that support Linux and Windows operating systems and provide significant flexibility in configuring VMs, allowing customization of size, storage options, and network settings.
However, there are some differences that we are going to see in the next subsections.
The types of instances in AWS EC2 are grouped into categories: general purpose, compute-optimized, memory-optimized, and storage-optimized. Each category is designed with specific CPU, memory, and storage configurations to meet different workload needs.
In the same way, Azure VMs use similar classifications, but they also include specialized instances such as GPU instances for tasks that require intensive graphics processing.
When it comes to scalability, AWS EC2 uses Auto Scaling to automatically adjust computing capacity based on workload fluctuations. This works by adjusting the number of EC2 instances, ECS tasks, or DynamoDB capacity units based on predefined policies, and can scale metrics such as CPU usage and network traffic.
Azure VMs, on the other hand, use Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (AVMSS) to automatically scale instances based on demand or schedule and can also scale on metrics such as CPU usage and network traffic.
Amazon offers AWS Outposts, a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to almost any customer data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility.
It allows customers to run AWS services such as computes, storage, databases, and others locally, offering a consistent hybrid experience across AWS cloud regions and on-premises environments. In practice, it extends AWS into on-premises environments, providing seamless integration between cloud services and local infrastructure.
Azure, on the other hand, has Azure Arc, which allows customers to manage resources such as virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters and data services on on-premises, multi-cloud and edge environments using Azure management tools and services. It helps to centralize governance, enforce policies, and implement Azure services on infrastructures distributed beyond Azure itself.
Essentially, AWS Outposts extends AWS services to on-premises locations, while Azure Arc extends Azure's management capabilities to hybrid and multi-cloud environments, without necessarily providing dedicated hardware. Both serve different aspects of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategies.
AWS and Azure offer a full range of database services that meet the needs of structured and unstructured data, including Big Data. In terms of data management durability, AWS users benefit from the Amazon RDS relational database service, while Azure provides the Azure SQL Server database.
AWS RDS supports six database engines: MariaDB, Amazon Aurora, MySQL, Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. Azure offers reliable and efficient support for SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB databases.
While AWS provides a wider range of instance types to choose from, Azure stands out with its easy-to-use tools and intuitive interface, simplifying various database operations.
Both AWS and Azure offer flexible pricing models to meet the different needs of their users, with the possibility of optimizing the costs of the services used through sophisticated control tools.
Going into detail about the pricing of each individual service would require several separate items; we will therefore limit ourselves to examining the pricing models of the two services from a simplified perspective.
AWS:
Azure:
AWS:
Azure:
Both platforms provide robust security measures to meet different compliance requirements in various industries, ensuring effective protection of workloads and data in the cloud.
When evaluating the security of cloud providers, three main factors must be considered:
Both AWS and Azure offer strong security features and extensive certifications, although there are some differences that we'll better see by making a simplified comparison of the various compliance and security features of the two providers.
AWS:
Azure:
Performance benchmarks generally indicate that AWS and Azure both offer high computing power and high performance, but specific results may vary depending on the instance types and configurations used.
AWS is often recognized for its raw computing power, making it a strong choice for applications that require high computational power, while Azure tends to excel in integrated service performance, especially for applications that are deeply integrated with Microsoft services, such as SQL Server and business applications that use Visual Studio.
However, the performance of AWS and Azure may depend on a variety of factors, including instance types, configurations, and the type of dedicated connections used.
Deciding between AWS and Azure depends on several criteria, including the specific needs of your business, your industry, and future trends in cloud computing.
First, evaluate your current infrastructure and technology stack.
AWS, known for its wide range of services and raw computational performance, may be more suitable for companies that require high computational power, albeit with the caveat of greater complexity of use that requires the extensive use of IT resources specialized in the use of open source software made available by the platform.
Azure, with its seamless integration with Microsoft products, is ideal for companies heavily invested in Microsoft technologies or already familiar with Redmond's home office work suites, offering superior performance for applications such as SQL Server and business tools that use Visual Studio.
Sector-specific recommendations also play a crucial role.
Azure's extensive industry-specific certifications, such as HITRUST and FedRAMP High, offer an advantage for industries that require strict compliance and very high levels of security. On the contrary, the wide range of AWS services makes the platform a versatile choice for different sectors, where in the commercial services sector it continues to hold tight leadership in usage rankings.
Future trends in cloud computing suggest an increasing focus on AI, machine learning, and hybrid cloud solutions. AWS and Azure are investing heavily in these sectors, but Azure Arc and AWS Outposts offer different hybrid cloud strategies that may influence your choice depending on the long-term IT plans you prefer to adopt.
Azure is a natural choice for organizations that already use Microsoft or SAP products. Azure offers license discounts for users of Windows, Office 365, and Dynamics 365, among other services. Compared to AWS, Azure includes a wider range of managed services and predefined capabilities that teams can access immediately.
Microsoft and SAP have a strategic partnership, aimed at building greater technological synergy. Migrating or deploying SAP on Azure is a pretty simple process, thanks to the integrations and migration tools available. By moving SAP to the Azure cloud, businesses can save up to 60% on storage costs and 40% to 75% on TCO.
Azure allows seamless data backup of the SAP HANA database to ensure effective disaster recovery and business continuity. SAP customers can now use the Microsoft Entra ID service to implement single sign-on (SSO) using Microsoft credentials and simplify user identity management.
SAP SuccessFactors solutions also now have direct integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot in Viva Learning, allowing users to benefit from Generative AI services.
If you want access to high-performance and scalable databases, Cosmos DB is the leading option on the market. A multi-master and managed NoSQL database service, Cosmos DB is used by companies like OpenAI to create high-traffic web applications and ensure low-latency data processing in real time.
With simplified management, multi-region data distribution, automatic scaling, updates and patching, Azure Cosmos DB removes the burden of database administration. Users also have access to open-source APIs for big data analysis and seamless integration with Azure AI services to support Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).
Some of the most common uses of Cosmos DB include IoT and telematics data processing, event-based e-commerce analysis, real-time content personalization, and more.
Azure Synapse Analytics combines enterprise-grade SQL data warehousing with integrated big data analysis tools. It offers access to proprietary technologies (e.g., Azure Data Factory, Azure Machine Learning, Power BI) and open-source technologies such as Apache Spark.
If your company already uses Azure for data warehousing, choosing Azure Synapse Analytics makes perfect sense thanks to the predefined integrations. In addition, Azure Synapse integrates directly with Cosmos DB, enabling real-time business intelligence scenarios and advanced analysis.
Microsoft is an undisputed leader in low-code technology. Power Platform combines visual application development and workflow automation tools with more advanced capabilities to quickly build backend integrations to support a wide range of business use cases.
Users can also integrate various Azure services into Power Apps (from Azure Functions for developing custom logic to Azure Cognitive services) to create innovative products for the workplace with costs and development times reduced by 2-4 times.
While AWS still maintains the largest market share, Microsoft is acquiring new customers faster as companies want to use Azure OpenAI to launch private Gen AI models. About 3% of Azure's growth in the fourth quarter of last year was related to AI.
Thanks to the exclusive partnership (and investment participation) in OpenAI, Azure users were able to access most of the fundamental models as APIs.
In practice, companies can launch private Gen AI models in the Azure cloud, apply customized fine-tuning and implement RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) solutions to use business data in generating results, keeping sensitive data protected. Microsoft also contributes to the Semantic Kernel, which aims to bring prompt engineering and LLM orchestration tools to C# and Python developers.
Microsoft also offers one of the best vector databases, Azure Cosmos DB, and has recently added semantic search support to Azure Cache for Redis Enterprise. Both facilitate the provision of data for training AI models.
Amazon entered the Gen AI race a little later, aiming to try to quickly recover the disadvantage against the Redmond giant in the field of AI. The three Gen AI services available include Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Titan, and Amazon SageMaker JumpStart.
SageMaker JumpStart provides an integrated development environment for creating and deploying ML models. In addition to the popular MLOps tools, the IDE allows users to easily integrate and refine Hugging Face open-source models. Amazon Titan and Amazon Bedrock offer access to Gen AI models provided by partners and owners for text and image generation, semantic search, and augmented retrieval generation.
Although Amazon's efforts in the field of AI are beginning to give their first valuable results, Azure's position in this area remains absolutely dominant on AWS, both for the greater amount of documentation that facilitates the work of developers, and for the greater ease of use compared to the offer of Mr. Bezos's cloud platform.
The choice of a cloud provider is definitely not to be taken lightly and can make a difference for your organization both in terms of costs and the quality of life of its employees and the quality of the services it offers to its customers.
Both AWS and Azure offer cloud computing services that are robust and suitable for a variety of business needs. Sometimes these services can offer the end user (with the necessary adjustments in both cases) the same results, but the subtle differences between the two can seriously influence the weight of the decision from one side of the scale to the other.
Although AWS is still the leading cloud platform in the sector, with recent trends in cloud computing linked to strong interest in AI and Machine Learning (not to mention slightly lower usage costs), Azure is currently gaining a solid long-term strategic advantage on Amazon's cloud computing platform.
This, combined with Microsoft's growing interest in open source software (until a few years ago, the workhorse of AWS), the low-code approach (which has always been Microsoft's flagship) and the greater familiarity in business environments with Redmond software, makes Azure (unless there are disruptive future developments) the safest choice at the moment for all those organizations that want to migrate their digital infrastructures “into the clouds” without excessive worries.
Although both platforms offer comprehensive and apparently similar cloud services, the differences lie in the underlying technologies, service management, and approach to integration with other tools. Azure stands out for its deep integration with the Microsoft ecosystem, while AWS has established itself for the variety of configurations available, its open-source approach, and a wide range of functionality.
In a business environment already based on Microsoft solutions, Azure is generally the most advantageous choice. It offers native integrations, favorable economic conditions for those who already use Microsoft licenses, and greater business continuity with existing infrastructure.
Performance varies depending on configurations and use cases. AWS stands out for its computing power, making it suitable for computationally intensive applications. Azure, on the other hand, is particularly efficient for applications integrated with Microsoft services, offering optimized performance in familiar business environments with tools such as SQL Server and Visual Studio.
Convenience depends on the type of use and on the commitments made over time. Both platforms adopt flexible pricing models and offer tools for estimating and optimizing costs. Azure tends to be more advantageous for companies that already use Microsoft services, while AWS may be more effective for those looking for extreme flexibility and have consolidated technical skills.
Microsoft Azure is currently in a dominant position in the field of AI thanks to its integration with OpenAI models. Users can easily create generative AI-based solutions, customize models, and integrate them with other Azure services. AWS offers competitive alternatives such as SageMaker and Bedrock, but the Azure ecosystem is more mature and accessible for many organizations.
Yes, Azure integrates with the Microsoft Power Platform, allowing the rapid development of applications and automations even without writing code. This integration makes it possible to reduce development times and costs, facilitating innovation within companies. AWS offers development tools, but it doesn't have an integrated low-code proposition as powerful as that of Azure.
Azure offers Cosmos DB, a high-performance NoSQL database, managed, scalable and distributed across multiple regions. It is particularly suitable for high-traffic applications, real-time analysis and use cases related to artificial intelligence. AWS offers DynamoDB and other NoSQL databases, but Cosmos DB is often cited as more comprehensive for advanced use cases.
Both offer effective hybrid solutions, but with different approaches. AWS offers Outposts, which brings cloud infrastructure directly on-premises. Azure, on the other hand, uses Azure Arc, which allows you to manage resources even on environments outside the Microsoft cloud, offering greater management flexibility without additional hardware.
Both platforms have high security standards. Azure stands out for a wider offering in terms of governance, monitoring and SIEM tools thanks to services such as Microsoft Sentinel and Defender for Cloud. AWS excels in DDoS protection and support for open-source environments, but Azure is often the first choice in highly regulated industries.
Although AWS still holds the largest market share, Azure is experiencing faster growth rates, driven in particular by the demand for AI solutions and the native integration with the Microsoft environment, which is very common in the business environment.
The Infra & Security team focuses on the management and evolution of our customers' Microsoft Azure tenants. Besides configuring and managing these tenants, the team is responsible for creating application deployments through DevOps pipelines. It also monitors and manages all security aspects of the tenants and supports Security Operations Centers (SOC).
