Difference in Approach in AZURE and AWS

The cloud computing industry has exploded in recent years, with many providers popping up and offering users similar services and products.

When it comes to the industry, two names appear to stand out. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft's Azure. These two are the most popular cloud providers there are. Both offer rich cloud ecosystems that offer users several options and features like superior compute power, scalability, and security.

But here's the problem: if choosing between cloud providers wasn't challenging enough, the choice between these two can be a problem on its own because of the wealth of features they offer. When considering either, though, it's essential to take all these features into account to decide which service will be best for your needs and requirements.

In short, Azure is about services while AWS focuses on its rich feature set. In addition, Azure focuses on cloud hosted enterprise infrastructure, while AWS places an emphasis on hosted cloud applications. As a result, the ultimate incentive with AWS is serverless infrastructure for applications, while with Azure it's the workflow.

And to complicate things even further many of these features do the same thing but they have different names. So, ultimately, a lot of research has to go into the choice of cloud provider. This takes a lot of effort and is time-consuming. 

Fortunately, we're here to help and in this post, we'll deal with the differences in approach that these two giants in the cloud computing industry take.

Services vs Feature Set

In terms of the basic functionality of these two services, they're pretty similar. As a result, they share many common features and services between them and other cloud providers. As such, their services include cloud computing, security, instant provisioning, scaling, compliance, and identity management.

The big difference comes in with how these two providers offer its users its services and features. Having a long history in enterprise software, Microsoft incentivizes using their software suite and products for development, source control, and deployment. In simple terms Azure office users with an integrated environment for developing, testing, and deploying their applications.

On the other hand, although both want users to work within their respective ecosystems, Amazon incentivizes serverless infrastructure since it's a closed system. In other words, while Microsoft wants users to invest in their software, Amazon wants users to commit their solution to be exclusive to AWS.

Incentive vs Workflow

The concept of workflow is also something to consider, and it directly impacts the way you develop on these two services. It also plays a role in what the intended practices are from the two services.

Here, the workflow with both platforms favors a separation of concerns and environments. For example, AWS offers users VPC or Virtual Private Cloud, which makes it easier to create separated networks inside their cloud instance. Likewise, Azure office Virtual Network which can be used to build isolated networks similar to AWS.

When it comes to pricing, both AWS and Azure offer a pay-as-you-go structure. There is, however, a big difference in billing structure between these two platforms. AWS charges per hour with instances available on-demand or capable of being reserved.

Azure charges on a per-minute basis, which offers users a more exact pricing model than AWS. And it also offers users short-term commitments that allow them to choose between monthly or prepaid charges.

Apart from this, Microsoft has a multitude of other software and solutions available outside of Azure that users can use. These all tie in and integrate with Azure services.

Infrastructure vs App

The utilization of Amazon's infrastructure lends it well to microservice architecture of an application. In fact, it's one of the best options if you want to deploy a microservice-based application. This is simply because of the variety of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS solutions and SDK packages that it offers.

With a microservices architecture, there is a clear separation of concerns with all processes of the application deployed separately but interacting together. As such, each process has its own datastore, and it's built around specific capabilities. This provides built-in redundancy. In other words, a failure of one process does not necessarily mean a failure of the rest.

In contrast, Microsoft favors a mixture of micro and monolithic architectures. This is simply because it directly ties in with its core technologies. For example, a monolithic application uses one technology stack for the entire application.

So, Microsoft favors this because it has the technologies available to enable developers to use one stack for an application. On the other hand, monolithic applications are typically very expensive when deployed on AWS because you have to pay twice, for use and availability, depending on the application.

In addition, Azure already has hybrid capabilities in place, which allows users to connect datacenters seamlessly to the cloud. As a result, it makes it easier for users to integrate their applications between on-premises infrastructure and the cloud.

The Bottom Line

When it comes to a cloud computing solution, both AWS and Azure are excellent options. They offer a similar feature set and capabilities, but they take a different approach to implementing these features and capabilities.

Although both work into integrating you into their suite and ecosystem, AWS incentivizes serverless infrastructure that is ideal for microservices architecture. in contrast, Microsoft, with its vast range of other software and platform, incentivizes the use of these products for development, source control, and deployment. Ultimately, it focuses on providing a fully integrated solution.

If you want to know more about Azure or AWS, how you can migrate your applications or systems to the cloud, or about the services we offer, please contact me here on LinkedIn.

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