If you, like so many efficiency- and cost-conscious organizations are considering migrating to the cloud, you’ve probably already shortlisted the top cloud and IaaS Service providers, namely: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Providers of GCP.
Given that AWS and Azure have the lion’s share of the market—with ~32% and `19% respectively— and have proven themselves repeatedly, chances are either of these can suit your needs.
When it comes to basic capabilities, such as autoscaling, elastic compute, and storage, there are some distinct differences that one should take into account when making a decision. Let’s take a look at each one’s capabilities in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) ecosystem—viz: infrastructure hardware and software, hosting features, applications, database service, and pricing strategies.
By Gartner’s estimates demand for Iaas, which went from ~USD50 billion in 2020 to ~USD64 billion in 2021, is massive and growing
AWS Pros
Spread of services
One of AWS’s fundamental strengths is its vast menu of services. It offers over 175 different services spread across both conventional offerings like compute, storage, and database and emerging technologies such as AI/ML, IoT, and next-gen analytics
First mover advantage
AWS, which has often been credited with pioneering the industry itself, started in 2006, long before any of the other cloud providers, including Azure. AWS’s head start gave it massive learnings that stand it in good stead even now, helping de-risk new offerings and making it easier for enterprises today to deploy and manage their clouds.
Partner ecosystem
AWS has also built a robust Partner network and 3rd party software service providers: In a nutshell, a vibrant ecosystem that enables enterprises to tailor their cloud with services and features they need to build and execute strategy.
Big Data Storage
AWS Elastic Block Storage (EBS) is ideal for big data. Its user-friendly, speedy and flexible block service makes it ideal for intensive workloads—throughput and transactive—at scale.
Archival Superiority
AWS S3 Glacier is extremely cost-effective. With charges starting at just USD0.004 per gig/month, it makes for significant cost reductions. Glacier also allows storage of large as well as smaller volumes of data making it perfect for data archival for all sizes of enterprises.
AWS Cons
The vast, and growing, the spread of services that AWS provides can in itself be a stumbling block for the untutored. Navigating this ecosystem can be a complex task, often leading to avoidable expenses. This, however, can be circumvented by partnering with a suitable cloud consultant or managed services provider.
Azure–Pros
Lineage
Azure’s biggest strength comes from its antecedents! As a Microsoft product, Azure offers a high degree of familiarity. So it makes a lot of sense for corporations to choose to source their technology products from one proven place, i.e. Microsoft. Microsoft further leverages this mindset by packaging products like Office 365 with their cloud offerings. In a nutshell, enterprises that are already working with MS products are naturally positioned to pick Azure to cater to their IaaS & PaaS requirements.
Open to opensource
Microsoft is more welcoming of open source technologies; as a matter of fact, aver 50% of its workloads run on Linux OS. This has led to the significant adoption of Microsoft Azure cloud services.
Easy integration
Azure’s ability to easily integrate onsite servers with your instances in the cloud, makes it easy to migrate and manage workloads.
Pricing
Azure led the way with pay as you go pricing—their per-minute pricing offers substantial savings, especially for enterprise players
Azure—Cons
Service Support
Anecdotal and empirical evidence finds Azure’s ability to render technical support lacking, as compared to AWS. Add to this the disproportionate number of outages Azure has suffered and one can understand why organizations tend to pick AWS rather than Azure.
Pricing
Given the frequency of pricing changes, it’s not easy to offer an apples-to-apples price comparison of AWS to Azure. That said, Azure does have a slight lead when it comes to on-demand pricing on Windows OS. This, however, fades away with on-demand Linux Operating Systems, where AWS has the advantage.
In Conclusion
It must be mentioned that simple price comparisons do not, as a matter of fact, help in decision-making. Instead, try to identify where your biggest estimated costs lie and select the provider offering lower prices in this area. Once again, try avoiding a mix-and-match approach as it can be quite complicated to manage a multi-cloud environment.
In the same way before choosing one provider over another, you need to map your business needs—today and for at least five years into the future. Teleglobal can help, as partners to both Azure and AWS, we can provide the Azure Consulting Services as well as AWS cloud consulting services you need to help you realize your cloud-related digital transformation aspirations quickly, painlessly, and cost-effectively.
If you would like to discuss your cloud needs, do connect with us using the form below. Our experts will be happy to help.
