Azure Vs. AWS - A Comparative Analysis

The advent of cloud computing has opened the gates of opportunities for information sharing. There has been a significant shift in paradigms. The emergence of cloud computing has enabled businesses to invest in expanding their core businesses instead of spending a considerable amount of capital on upgrading their IT infrastructure. Cloud computing itself has come a long way since its emergence. Earlier, cloud computing included the likes of Application Service Provision and software as a service, but the comprehensive concept of delivering computing resources through  an organized global network came into being in the late 1960’s. Presently, there are two big players dominating the cloud computing market, with AWS leading the race. Nowadays, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) certification can serve as your ticket to a lucrative career. With an average salary cap of US$ 69, 683, this certification can help you move from strength to strength.

AWS’s proprietary cloud computing service is popularly called Elastic Compute Cloud. It is a comprehensive cloud computing solution and gives adequate storage with the S3 service. Archiving services are also available if Glacier is used. Block storage is also given to the user which is equivalent to the hard disks of our computers. The good thing about block storage is that it can either be paired with a task (instance) or can also be kept independently. The company also supports NoSQL services, relational databases, and big data. With an array of services under its belt, Amazon Web Services is ranked the No1 cloud computing service in the world with Microsoft’s Azure being ranked a distant second.

It also provides users with an opportunity to configure virtual machinery. These machines can be configured using pre-configured AMIs called custom AMIs. The EC2 gives you a myriad of services to choose from right from balancing the load to auto-scaling. You can even choose the size, memory, power, and the total number of VMs required by you. Moreover, you can even choose between different geographical regions and decide where to launch.

On the other hand, Azure’s cloud computing network, popularly called VNET, allows a user to merge independent or isolated networks. You can develop private IP address ranges, network topologies, subnets, and route tables. It also provides you the following services to choose from:

Mobile and web

These services supplement the development of mobile as well as web apps. You can also manage your API notifications using it.

Computing

This service has containers, an access to remote apps and virtual machines etc.

Analytical services

These provide storage and distributed analytics in real-time.  Other services that fall under this gamut are data lakes, data warehousing and storage, and machine learning.

Data storage

You can store your data using Database as a Service if you are using NoSQL and SQL. There is cached cloud storage on offer as well.

Networking

This category includes dedicated connections, gateways, and virtual networks to choose from. Other services such as load balancing can also be availed.

Comparing AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Microsoft Azure

For bringing out the difference between Azure and AWS, we can compare a popular feature called Beanstalk with Azure’s equivalent for the same:

One striking difference between AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Microsoft Azure is that the AWS Elastic Beanstalk comes with features such as:

• Application configuration and management
• Environment management
• Environment configuration
• Monitoring the environment

Whereas Microsoft’s Azure also provides you with several wide-ranging features such as-:

• An opportunity to build websites with, PHP, Node.js, and ASP.NET
• There’s a feature that helps you to deploy and run the Linux VM and Windows Server
• Also, you have the freedom to migrate to innovative apps and infrastructure

Another significant difference lies in the type of integrations available. The AWS Elastic Beanstalk can integrate with the following business systems and applications:

• JetBrains
• Papertrail
• Datadog
• Jenkins
• Deep Security
• Semaphore

Whereas Microsoft Azure can be easily paired with the following applications:

• MindFlash
• TalentLMS
• Gluu.biz
• Media Valet
• Asset Bank

In a world full of choices, choosing the right thing might be a daunting task. With AWS and Azure at your disposal, you have two of the best cloud computing systems to choose from. You can be part of a comprehensive cloud computing course at QuickStart and guarantee yourself the best of both worlds. The course would take you through the best practices for creating AWS-based cloud solutions while leveraging AWS computing services to provision virtual machines. All you need to have is some basic understanding of cloud computing concepts and you are good to go.