AWS and Azure: Services Overview and Comparison

What is Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a concept of uploading, storing, accessing, and managing data, websites, applications, platforms, and other IT resources of any type in a cloud environment. Data on cloud is accessible from anywhere across the globe with only two most important requirements, internet connectivity and permission to access, unlike physical databases where remote access is not a possibility. Cloud computing helps avoid significant investments in hardware acquisition and management, as it provides cost-friendly solutions that are tailored to business needs and require the least maintenance in terms of the pay-as-you-go payment model. Cloud computing offers a simple way to access servers, storage, databases, and a broad set of application services over the Internet.

There are numerous different cloud providers in the market today, and the demand of cloud computing seems to increase at an astounding rate. Although many players are making a mark with edgy solutions, two names have long stayed the market leaders with the highest market shares. There is only one possibility that you cannot guess the names, and that is if you have heard about cloud computing for the first time today. Even then, a lot of you may be knowing about these cloud computing giants beforehand. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

AWS and Azure: Services Overview and Comparison

Further in this article, we will dive into a brief introduction of AWS and Azure, an overview of cloud environments both offer and a little about the top-performing cloud services they offer. We’ll cover AWS first since it is the market leader with almost double the share Azure claims. Let’s get to it then.

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services: A cloud platform that offers reliable, scalable, easy-to-use, flexible, and cost-friendly cloud solutions. It is a comprehensive solution presented as a platform by Amazon and is developed as a combination of three forms of services, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS)

Amazon Web Services was launched in 2002, and its cloud products surfaced back in 2006. It took AWS around a decade to achieve a $10 billion revenue mark and were offering around 100 cloud products in 2019 already. These two simple facts are enough to validate the popularity and success of AWS.

Overview of AWS Cloud

One of many facts and qualities that make AWS a smart and popular choice for choosing is as a cloud vendor, is its comprehensive nature that offers a whole universe of products and services to build your cloud environment. It provided the options for start-ups and established organizations to build their digital infrastructure from the ground up and smartly omitting the need for a physical database by reducing costs, increasing efficiency, enhancing security and providing absolute ease in management of hybrid cloud environments. There is no upfront cost of investment, and no amount of dollars spent on AWS seems to go waste, as it can be shrunk or expanded as the needs evolve.

Since AWS is a complete cloud management platform, the services range from cloud computing to networking, storage to migration, database management, and its tools, analytics, storage, messaging, and much more. The next section will cover the essential features of AWS that have made it a renowned success among small and large businesses.

Top 7 AWS Services

Among a broad range of AWS services, below are some of the key offerings in the AWS environment and short explanation on how they can help solve business problems specific to business needs.

1.      EC2

Amazon EC2 is one of the most used services for server hosting and configuration. It allows you to bring “instances” online in a matter of minutes. Instances are another name for virtual machines. There are three types of EC2 examples:

Compute Optimized: For extremely high request rates, compute-optimized instances are used, with the ability to leverage industry-leading processors.

Memory-Optimized: Used to acquire efficient memory cost per-GB of memory

Storage Optimized: Used for fast data retrieval requests by providing the ability to access fast SSD storage.

2.      Amazon S3

Simple Storage Services shortened to S3; this service provides users with tools that use buckets to store and move data. There are four ways to store data using buckets with varying costs:

• Amazon Standard Storage - Used for frequently accessed data, with the ability to grow as per business requirements
• Amazon Infrequent Access Storage - As the name suggests, this is used to monitor and manage resources that are important but are accessed less frequently, charging less than standard storage because of increased downtime.
• Amazon Glacier - An archiving solution for data that needs to be stored, but accessed very less often, hence widely known as archiving a storage solution rather.
• Amazon Reduced Redundancy Storage - Storage of non-essential data primarily that is also reproducible. The durability is even lower than other storage services because the data is mostly unimportant.

3.      Elastic Load Balancing

Elastic Load Balancer, also known as ELB is a load balancing solution that ensures server requests remain in balance, without overloading one specific server. There are two types of load balancing:

• Classic Load Balancing - Ensures fault tolerance if one of the EC2 instances running web application happens to fail by analyzing network and application data.
• Application Load Balancing - Based on the Application content, this type looks at content request to route traffic to the suitable container or microservice

4.      CloudFront

A global content delivery system, the strength of CloudFront lies in its ability to deliver content to its users, with optimized speed, from the AWS region closest to the end-user. The primary aim of CloudFront or one major benefit it provides is delivering an improved user experience across the globe.

5.      Elastic Block Store (EBS)

EBS promises low-latency instance access for EC2 by providing persistent Block-level storage volumes. You can also access high-speed SSD storage and have another layer of security with encryption and Access Control Lists.

6.      Amazon Route 53

Route 53 is a DNS routing service that offers high speed and is available at low costs.  It is the network of DNS servers hosted across the globe in many AWS regions.

7.      CloudWatch

CloudWatch is Amazon’s monitoring service that gathers logs and constantly checks metrics for resources like EC2 instance, DynamicDB tables, Amazon RDS DB instances, and Custom metrics.

This sums up the AWS basic services that are most used and are considered essential in building a cloud environment. Let’s move on to Microsoft Azure and its services. You can then have a fair idea of how both the platforms favor its users in fulfilling the cloud needs of their businesses.

What is Microsoft Azure

Azure is a Microsoft cloud solution providing businesses an opportunity to run servers, networking, storage, analytics, databases, and more of its computing operations virtually. Being a public cloud platform, it makes sense to say that Azure purchases hardware on behalf of businesses and provides them cloud solutions on a rent basis, lifting the burden of investments and maintenance of physical databases off the shoulders of companies. Azure supports in building, managing, and deploying applications with efficiency, robustness, and tailored costs.

Azure was announced two years later than AWS in 2008 to be specific, after which preview versions started to roll. Initially, it was an internal project named Project Red Dog that came out to public availability as Azure in 2010. In the beginning, it started with much less potential to be preferred over AWS, but the past decade has seen it coming a long way. Now standing right behind AWS, it is inarguably at a pace to reach AWS soon, since the market share and acceptance trends tell us companies are adopting or shifting to Azure now faster than ever. According to Microsoft, almost 1000 companies join Azure daily, which is an unbelievable rate, but true and validated by many.

Overview of Microsoft Azure

Azure, like AWS, is suitable for businesses of all sizes, depending on the needs. An applaudable fact about Azure is that around 85% of Fortune 500 companies are using Azure as their cloud solution, and there are no stories about Azure disappointing them. Not just all the big companies, Azure is getting popularity among the small and medium businesses, helping them avoid outsourcing, hiring, and maintenance costs. The Hyper-scale infrastructure of Azure is the enabler, and there are around 100+ databases across 36 regions, ensuring the data is served to its users across the world at a favorable speed. This delivers user experience unparalleled by any other service except AWS. Multiple features make Azure a decent choice to make, including

• Disaster recovery: Multiple data centers for data storage (offering more than one location to deploy cloud solution), Azure site recovery (replicating workloads to avoid disruption of applications), Azure traffic manager (network routing automated to different locations), 3 x data replication (where data is copied three times)
• Elasticity: Azure allows users to adjust their cloud environment as per the rising and stooping needs. For example, seasonal traffic on e-commerce websites, or increased load on accounting software in the first couple months of the year. The tools in Azure allow you to gauge the potential difference adjusting can make, and you will pay only for what you use, without wasting even a penny on unused services.
• Development tools: Azure development tools help bring innovations without worrying about the room in the system, diminishing the need to purchase new hardware for development and testing, and allowing to implement ideas without wasting any time, resulting in increased productivity and fastened application delivery.
• Cost Efficiency: Pay as you go is the right way of defining cost-efficiency. You can save costs in three ways, a) No need to build a large on-premise database; b) No service calls and warranty renewals; c) Billing per the second usage, avoiding maximum unnecessary costs.

Top Azure Services

Azure has witnessed a rapid growth in the last couple of years, and the graph of the improvement in market share can be attributed to its frequent releases of effective, cost-friendly services. Here are the top services that are worth mentioning, and have contributed to the growth of Azure as a public cloud

1.      Azure DevOps

For DevOps teams, this service is aimed to deliver applications faster by enabling smarter collaboration and better planning. It offers planning, tracking, and discussion on different agile tools that are proven to work in reflecting efficiency and improved project and product deliveries.

2.      Virtual Machine

Another core service in the compute category; this service helps create VMs in Linux and Windows, taking seconds to reach completion. There are Compute-optimized VMs, Burstable VMs, general-purpose VMs, and Memory-optimized VMs with Microsoft Azure. They are cost-efficient, and users also have the opportunity to explore a series of VMs on Azure.

3.      Azure Active Directory

A universal identity platform, Azure Active Directory manages and secures identities on the Azure platform. It offers single sign-on and multi-factor authentication to protect users from widespread cybersecurity threats.

4.      Azure Cosmos DB

Cosmos DB by Azure is a database solution that is distributed globally with over 100+ databases in around 36 regions, with more regions in the process of release. Cosmos DB ensures 99.999 percent availability and restricts latencies to single-digit milliseconds. Cosmos DB is also a multi-model with wire protocol-compatible API endpoints.

5.      Azure Content Delivery Network

Offering trusted reliability and security in delivering content, what makes Azure CDN different is its capability to manage unexpected traffic surges ensuring smooth content delivery regardless of the traffic spikes. Most favorable for e-commerce platforms, CDN offers deep analytics to track consumer patterns that helps reduce the gap between customers’ expectations and organizations’ content delivery.

6.      API Management

As the name suggests, API management deals in managing, securing, analyzing, and publishing APIs in a matter of few minutes. Considered as one of the best services by Azure, it allows users to create APIs that are sophisticated and smooth in terms of customer usability and consistency.

Now that you have a fair idea about AWS and Azure, their services that outperform competitors, and possible reasons why they are the two most highly accepted cloud solutions across the globe, you can choose one of these for your business needs. Once you have decided to go for one of these, you might want to get trained or have your teams trained for relevant skills, and QuickStart can help

Cloud Institute offers AWS and Azure training on basic concepts as well as prepares candidates for the latest certification exams by Microsoft and Amazon Web Services. Take a look at the available courses, and get yourself and your teams the latest cloud skills.