Who Rules the Cloud Service: AWS or Azure?
By: Vishnu Aravindhan
Tags: Microsoft, Amazon, Cloud Computing, Software Engineering, Cloud

Amazon Web Service (AWS)

AWS is owned by Amazon and it is the number one cloud provider, according to the Public Cloud Share. That is the percentage of companies, the money involved in AWS is around 32% right now. So it is the maximum and that’s why AWS is the leader in the cloud industry for the past 10 to 15 years.

Microsoft Azure

Azure is owned by Microsoft, and it comes second only to AWS. They are second in the cloud race and they are again the same type of technology. So Azure is provided by Microsoft, but even then they are just a cloud provider like AWS.

Similarities between AWS and Azure

So both provide similar services, even though they provide similar services, they are two different entities owned by two different companies providing various services which are named differently. But their functionality is going to be the same. So I think you get the point that AWS and Azure are cloud providers owned by Amazon and Microsoft, respectively. AWS is the number one in cloud market share and Azure is number two and these two are the major cloud providers in the entire cloud computing industry.

AWS vs Azure

1. Launch Date

AWS launched in the year 2006 and Azure launched in the year 2010. So basically in technology years, 4 years is a very long gap and that is one of the main reasons AWS has captured a lot of businesses and are in the lead in the cloud computing race

AWS came into the cloud industry, but EC2 and S3 as the first projects of their first tools which were out for the public. And in 2010, Azure came up with basic services, like virtual machines, Azure storage, Azure database. So they came up with their own services.

2. Regions

AWS has 77 availability zones in 24 geographical regions across the globe. So these availability zones are the ones that have the physical servers, all the physical components which are required to launch service, database engines, or storage units. So AWS is the cloud provider that has the maximum number of availability zones in the world.

Why is availability zones really important?

Let’s say you’re from India, you’re launching an application in India and it’s very successful and your customer base is growing even out of the country. When that is happening, you want to expand your application to a global audience, and if you’re using an on-premise set up with your own data center, a small data center. So in this case, you’ll have to buy more servers to accommodate more users or you’ll have to buy the servers in whichever location or whichever country in which you are going to extend your application. You’ll have to buy a data center over there, or you’ll have to buy a location, buy a space and set up a data center. But instead of doing that, if you’re using AWS or if you’re using Azure, in that case, you can use their global infrastructure and set up your application anywhere in the world just by sitting in your own office. So we can do that across the globe and you can engage your application with the global audience.

Now, Azure has 60 different availability zones, but they are in 60 different regions, which is most by any cloud provider. So even though AWS was early in the cloud business, Microsoft was early in the tech business. Microsoft came into the tech business way before Amazon came into it.

So Amazon first launched as an e-commerce website, not a tech website or a website that provides cloud services. So Microsoft was already having a wide infrastructure across the world. So they were able to build their architecture accordingly. So their cloud infrastructure has grown across the globe in 60 different regions.

Why regions are important?

Let me give you a brief example. Over here in India, there are three different availability zones in one particular region, which is in Mumbai. But if you look at India in Azure, you can see West India, Central India, and South India. So they have three different available results in three different regions, which can be helpful for low latency in applications. So let’s say your application is mostly concentrated in South India, you can host it on the South Indian data center. If it is in Central India or if you want to concentrate on the whole of India, you can put in all the data centers. Or if you just want to concentrate on the north side of India or the west side of India, you can go ahead with the west or central India. The same goes for every single available zone or every single region available across.

So this is a difference. AWS has 77 Availability zones but in 24 geographical regions. Microsoft has 60 available zones lesser than AWS, but they have it in 60 different regions. That’s the main difference. Also at the beginning of 2019, AWS had 54 availability zones and Azure had 44 availability zones. So both of them have grown pretty wildly.

In 2021, AWS is planning to build 18 more availability zones in six more regions, and Azure is planning to get 8 more available zones in 3 more azure regions. So they’re still planning more regions.

3. Market Share

As a common person, it doesn’t matter. You can choose any of the cloud services which you want and you can start working on it and you can get a job in it.

But why do we talk about market share?

So let me tell you. First, whenever the market share for a particular business means a lot of businesses or a lot of companies are using that particular technology. So let’s say AWS if their market share or their spending on that particular cloud provider is high. In that case, a lot of companies are investing in AWS. So if a lot of companies are investing in AWS, that means you have an abundance of jobs in various companies. So if you go with AWS or Azure or Google cloud, you have a lot of companies who are working with them. You can get into a job with them.

According to Gartner Aws is the leading cloud service provider. So this means they are visionaries and they are leaders. So Microsoft, Google, Amazon services all come under leaders and visionaries. But the leading leaders are Amazon Web services and the leading visionary is Amazon Web Services.

4. Niche players

This means the cloud services providers play on their particular role. So Alibaba Cloud or Oracle or IBM or Tencent Cloud, they have their cloud services which can accommodate their own company’s infrastructure and the companies which are using similar services and that’s why they are called niche players. They only play in that particular area. They don’t move out of their expertise. But AWS, Microsoft, and Google are exploring the entire industry from healthcare, from retail to I.T. companies. So Every single place they have put down their staff.

5. Clients

Now, the top clients of Amazon Web Services are Netflix, Twitch, LinkedIn, and Facebook. So I think most probably, you know, these four different services at four different websites. So Netflix is the top media streaming platform in the world. Twitch is the top live streaming platform in the world. LinkedIn is the top job connectivity or job finding portal in the world. And Facebook is the largest social media network in the world. So four of these companies are using Amazon Web services for their cloud needs.

For Azure, the top spending companies or the top companies using are BMW, Twitter, Samsung, and eBay. Again, you would obviously know all of these companies. They are top companies who are using Azure for their cloud needs.

So if you are working well enough, you can get into these companies as a cloud architect or you can get into the previous companies, which I mentioned, Netflix, Facebook or LinkedIn or even eBay or Twitter. So you can get into these companies if you are a cloud architect or a cloud developer or an administrator or whatever it is, you can get into these companies and get a high salary.

6. Services

In AWS, the relevant service is EC2 and in Azure, it is Azure Virtual Machine. So both of these services provide a secure, scalable, and reliable compute capacity (i.e) A server in the cloud. You can create a server as per your needs on the cloud.

7. Storage

In Azure, you have to go to Azure blob storage. In AWS, you have to go to AWS S3 or AWS Simple Storage Service. So again, these two are similar services, S3 uses object storage to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. Massively scalable and secure object storage for cloud-native workloads are archives and data lakes. So basically they are similar, just different explanations or different definitions for the same service, but they are provided by two different organizations.

8. Database

AWS has a Relational database service and Azure has SQL databases.

What is the difference between a relational database and an SQL database?

They both use SQL and they are both database engines. In AWS, set up an operate and scalable relational database in the cloud with just a few clicks. In Azure, built apps that scale with the pace of your business with managed and intelligent SQL in the cloud.

So basically you can create a cloud engine on both. You can create a database on the cloud which is scalable, so you can set it up as scaled automatically, so it’ll automatically scale up for you.

So in this case, they have similar services, the only major part is that AWS provides more services than Azure. AWS provides more than 150+ services right now, because, again, saying that they have a 4 years lead in the cloud computing industry, that’s why they are leading by a lot. Even Azure provides a lot of services, they provide 100+ services, not as much as AWS. So you can go with any of them.

In the year 2021, both of them are growing at a really fast pace and other cloud services are trying to catch up with them, but they’re not able to. AWS and Azure are still growing, so you can go ahead and take up AWS or Azure, there is no problem in taking up any of these cloud providers.

9. Pricing Structure

Pricing models are one of the important factors before considering the cloud tool. In AWS, you have a pay-as-you-go model completely. It means whatever you use, you’ll pay for that at the end of the month. So you’ll start with zero credit. As you use services, it’ll succumb up to a particular value or a particular amount of money which will be paying at the end of the month.

Even Azure has pay-as-you-go, you can opt for that or there are also subscriptions where you can take up subscriptions that have certain limits within azure. So you can use that credit limit to go ahead and use the Azure service, which you want.

For 4 vCPLUS and 16-gigabyte memory, the On-Demand Linux instance in AWS will cost you 0.1856 dollars. But the same type of instance in Azure will cost you 0.1690 dollars. So now, just considering these two values, they’re are quite small and there is not much difference, it’s just like 0.15 Or something like that.

But if you’re server is running for 24*7 and there are 100s of servers with the same specifications that will save you a lot of money if you’re using Azure in this case.

But again, there is one more difference. That is in AWS, you’ll get more discounts if you’re taking up a one-year reserved or a three-year reserved instance and that means you will get a dedicated instance, dedicated server, where you can run instances at any time, and that can save you 42% of the money and in Azure, it can save you around 36% of the money. So AWS could be cheaper for the long run Azure will be cheaper if you’re going to use On-Demand instances.

One more part is that in AWS, you’ll be charged by the hour, (i.e) even though you have used a particular service for just one-minute even in that case, you’ll be charged by the hour. So you’ll have to pay the hourly rate. But in Azure, you’ll only be charged the minute rate. So if you’re using only for two minutes, you only pay for the two minutes you have used. You will not pay for the complete half.

Future Predictions for the Public Cloud Infrastructure

According to Gartner, the cloud infrastructure will improve by 35% in the year 2021. That means the companies are moving towards the cloud-first approach than an on-premise data centre. It’s increasing every single year, so there is no surprise element here. I just wanted to show what would be the future of the cloud industry. So again, when the cloud industry is growing, I would suggest you to get into it, so that you can grow with the cloud industry.

So you can visit these two sites, (aws.amazon.com and azure.microsoft.com) this is basically for India. You can check out the news updates which are coming out for AWS and Azure. They are basically in the latest article at first, so whichever change has been made recently, that will be at the top and you will get to know more about the changes or the changes of services in AWS and Azure.

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