Coming up with pioneering ideas and groundbreaking solutions to the modern world, Cloud Computing is on the peak. Now many cloud vendors have come into the market to claim themselves as leaders in the cloud computing world. Talking about who is the leader of the Cloud market, two names come instantly in our mind, AWS and Azure, Two giants of the market.
Why choose Azure over AWS or why choose AWS over Azure? We will cover these questions in our article that is based on a comparison between AWS and Azure.
So, today we’ll be deciding who is better on the basis of their origin and the features they provide, their performance in the present day, and comparing them on the basis of Market Share Options, Pricing, Free Tier, and instance configuration.
Let’s Start with AWS
Let’s start with AWS. AWS launched in 2006 by the ecommerce giant Amazon. AWS is one of the most commonly used cloud computing platforms across the world companies like Adobe, Netflix, Airbnb, HTC, Pinterest, and Spotify have put their faith in AWS for the proper functioning.
It also dominates the cloud computing domain with almost 40% of the entire market share. So far nobody’s even gotten close to beating that number. AWS also provides a wide range of services that covers the great number of domains like Compute, Networking, Storage, Migration, and so much more.
Let’s see what Azure has to say
Now let’s see what Azure has to say about that. Azure was launched in 2010 and is trusted by almost 80 percent of all fortune 500 companies the best of the best companies in the world choose to work only with Azure.
Azure also provides its services to more regions than any other cloud service provider in the world. Azure covers 42 regions already and 12 more are being planned to be made. Azure also provides more than 100 services spanning a variety of domains.
Now that the opening statements are done; let’s have a look at the current market status of each of our competitors.
Market Share by 2020 of AWS and Microsoft Azure
We have the stats for the market share of AWS Azure and other cloud service providers this is for the early 2020 period. Amazon Web Services takes up a whopping 47.8% of the market share and the Market Share of Microsoft Azure is 26%.
This 52% indicates most organizations clear interest in using AWS. They are number one because of years of experience and trusts they’ve created trust among their users.
The rest of the market share represents other cloud platform providers like Google Cloud Platform, IBM Softlayer, and the list goes on.
Comparison Round
So, on now for our next round the comparison Round. First will be comparing pricing
Pricing Models of AWS and Azure
Both Azure and AWS have different pricing models for their users. Users have to pay for AWS services on an hourly basis, and the other hand, Azure users pay them on a per-minute basis.
If we talk about short term subscription plans, the Azure pricing model has plenty of versatility. Some Azure services might be costly to your budget as compared to AWS as far as scaling up the architecture is concerned.
We’ll be looking at the cost of a very basic instance, which is a virtual machine of two virtual CPUs and 8GB RAM. For AWS, this will cost you approximately $0.0928/hr US dollars per hour and for the same instance in Azure, it will cost you approximately $0.096/hr US dollars per hour.
Market Share and Options
Next up let’s compare market share and options. As I mentioned before, AWS is the undisputed market leader when it comes to the cloud computing domain taking up 47.8% % of the market share.
By 2020, AWS is also expected to produce twice its current revenue which comes close to forty four billion dollars. AWS is constantly expanding its already strong roster of more than hundred services to fulfill the shifting business requirements of organizations.
All that is great really good for you but the research company Gartner has released a Magic Quadrant that you have to see, you see the competition is now neck-to-neck between Azure and AWS, it’s only a matter of time before a jar can increase from its 26 percent market share and surpass AWS, this becomes more likely considering how all companies are migrating from AWS to Azure to help and satisfy their business needs.
Azure not far behind AWS when this comes to services as well as yours service offerings are constantly updated and improved on to help users satisfy their cloud computing requirement.
Free Tier
Now let’s compare AWS and Azure free offerings. AWS provides a significant number of its services for free helping users get hands-on experience with the platform, products and services.
The free tier services fall under two categories:
- Services that will remain free forever.
- And the others that are valid only for one year
Always Free Category
The always free category offers more than 20 services, for example: Amazon SNS, SQS, CloudWatch, etc.
Valid for a Year
And valid for a year category offers approximately 20 services, for example: Amazon S3, EC2, ElastiCache, etc.
Both types of services have limits on their usage (for example: storage, number of requests, compute time, etc.) but users are only charged for using services that fall under the “valid for a year” category after their year of usage.
Azure provides a free tier as well. It also provides services that belong to the categories of “free for a year and always free”. There are about twenty five-plus always free services provided by Azure these include App Service, Functions, Container Service, Active Directory, and lots more.
Valid for a Year
And as of the valid for a year, there are eight services offered there’s Linux or Windows Virtual Machines, Blob Storage, SQL Database, and few more.
Azure also provides the users with credits of 200 US dollars to access all the services for 30 days. Now this is a unique feature that Azure provides where users can use their credits to utilize any service of a choice for the entire month.
Instance Configuration
Now let’s compare instance configuration. The largest instance that AWS offers is that of a whopping 256 GB of RAM and 16 virtual CPUs. The largest instance that Azure offers 224 GB of RAM + 16 virtual CPUs.
Rapid Fire Round
And now for the final round each of our contestants will be shown facts, and they have to give explanations for these facts, we call it the rapid-fire round. First we have features in which AWS is good and azure is better. AWS does not cut down on the features it offers its users.
However, it requires slightly more management on the user’s part. Azure goes slightly deeper with the services that fall under certain categories like platform as a service and infrastructure as a service.
Next, we have a hybrid cloud where AWS is good and Azure is better. Although AWS did not emphasize on hybrid cloud earlier, they are focusing more on technology now. Azure has always emphasized on hybrid cloud and has features supporting it since the days of its inception.
For developers AWS is better and Azure is good. Of course it’s better because AWS supports integration with third-party applications. Well, Azure provides access to data centers that provide a scalable architecture.
For pricing, both AWS and Azure are at the same level; it’s good for AWS because it provides a competitive and constantly decreasing pricing model and in the case of Azure, it provides offers that are constantly experimented upon to provide its users with the best experience.
Wrapping Up the Comparison between AWS and Azure
And that’s it, the comparison between AWS and Azure have finished. Now let’s see who won, surprisingly nobody, each cloud computing platform has its own pros and cons. choosing the right one is based entirely on your organization’s requirements.
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