Azure vs AWS: Compute services comparison (2019)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure both offer a broad and profound set of services with global outreach. Many organizations choose to leverage both platforms together for a wide range of choices, flexibility, as well as, to mitigate the risk and dependencies with a “multi-cloud” approach. Despite everything, the Azure vs AWS cloud war continues to be at its peak.

Calculate, process, and compute—a computer’s fundamental role. In addition, the right cloud provider with the right service can scale up to thousands of processing nodes for you in just a few minutes.

If you need much faster processing for graphics, data analysis or any other high-performance application, you can either buy more hardware or simply migrate to cloud.

Now, if you buy the hardware, no doubt you own it as an asset. But, don’t forget that you are also paying for the idle time when the computers are not doing any actual processing and also the maintenance that comes with it which can be really high if you want to scale.

On the other hand, when you opt for cloud, you just pay for what you use and can scale up or down to thousands of processing nodes as per your needs.

“Compute” is a very holistic term and when we get into the details there are a plethora of branches depending on the different requirements. Hence, computing becomes the key pillar for a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) to get a worldwide customer base.

AWS vs Azure: Compute Services Comparison

The exponential growth of cloud adoption has made cloud providers bring in as many services as they can. You may want to have a clear view of the services being offered and their alternatives offered by different cloud providers. Amazon Web Services and Azure, both being the market leaders have a solid catalog when it comes to compute services.

S. No.	Services	AWS	Azure
1	Virtual Server	Amazon EC2	Azure Virtual Machine
2	Bare Metal Server	Amazon EC2 Bare Metal Instance (Preview)	Azure Bare Metal Servers (Large Instance Only for SAP Hana)
3	Virtual Dedicated Host	Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host	–
4	Shared Web Hosting	–	Azure Shared App Services
5	Container Registration Service	Amazon EC2 Container Registry	Azure Container Registry
6	Container Management Service	Amazon EC2 Container Service   Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS)	Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)   Azure Container Instances
7	Micro Services App Development Platform	AWS Lambda	Azure Service Fabric   Azure Functions   Event Grid
8	Virtual Private Servers	Amazon Lightsail	Azure App Service Environment
9	Auto Scaling	Auto Scaling	Azure Autoscale   Virtual Machine Scale Sets
10	Batch Jobs	AWS Batch	Azure Batch
11	App Development/ Deployment (Java/.Net/PHP/Python)	AWS Elastic Beanstalk	Azure Web Apps   Azure Cloud Services
12	Event Driven Computing	AWS Lambda	Azure Functions   Event Grid

 

In Conclusion:

The fundamental idea of providing so many compute services (or different type of virtual computers) is that customer can use a specific service to meet the requirements.

To select the service, you need to layout your actual requirements referring to the compute power for required operations. Amazon has the most popular compute service i.e. Amazon EC2 while on the other hand, Azure provides Virtual Machine.

Here, Amazon slightly gets ahead in the race for offering better compute services. But nowadays, most of the customers pick and choose services from both the cloud players which seems a more suitable option. It also helps you to avoid vendor lock-in.

Above all, the Azure vs AWS battle doesn’t stop at compute services. They have an extensive set of services to combat upon. Download the ultimate cheat sheet of AWS & Azure comparison.