In this digital era, gone are the days of
using physical storage devices, thanks to public cloud services.
And two of the biggest names in this domain are AWS and Microsoft Azure.
Hello and Happy new year to all of you, this is Shubham from Intellipaat and today we are
going to compare both of these cloud giants and discuss which one to choose?
So, without any further delays, let's get started.
First of all, let's take a brief look over both of these cloud services.
Starting off with Amazon web services.
According to their official website, Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary of Amazon.com
that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms to individuals, companies and governments,
on a paid subscription basis.
Similarly, Microsoft Azure is also a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for
building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global
network of Microsoft-managed data centers.
Now let's dig into their history and talk about their establishment.
Launched in 2006, AWS has more experience
in cloud domain than azure or any other cloud providers and has successfully met the on-demand
needs of enterprises in regards to cloud computing platform.
On the other hand, launched in 2010, Azure
has been a consistent competitor for AWS and is quite a competent cloud computing platform
for businesses.
But the question remains, how are these two cloud services different and what are the
factors that we need to focus on while comparing AWS & Azure?
Well, you're about to find out.
Now let's start from the basic and discuss
the first factor, that is availability zones.
As we have already gone through the establishment factor, we already know that AWS was the first
one of its kind.
Which means AWS is hosting in multiple locations world-wide, of course, it's true for Azure
as well.
But the difference occurs in the numbers of regions and availability zones.
Talking of numbers, AWS has 55 availability zones world-wide with 8 more on its way.
Whereas, azure is having 44 availability zones with a whooping number of 12 more on the way.
Talking of next factor, that is the market
shares.
AWS is having 40% of public cloud market shares worldwide, whereas Azure is having 30% of
it.
An interesting fact to notice here, that there is no other cloud provider that lies between
these 2 numbers in terms of public cloud market shares.
Making AWS on 1st and Azure on 2nd place.
Right?
Also If you check the google trends and see compare their popularity, these are the stats,
where you can easily figure out that how interest for AWS has been surpassing azure worldwide
in past 12 months.
Also, if we check their search results and trends according to USA.
Same case is here as well, where there is more interest for AWS than Azure.
In case of India, here are the results, Still AWS is more trending than Azure.
These are the results of past 12 months and have been varying and relatively increasing
with AWS on 1st and azure on 2nd from past a decade.
Making Azure a tough compettion for AWS, you must have a question in your mind, that there
must be other cloud providers between these numbers, well check out the results while
comparing other cloud vendors, like Google & IBM Cloud along with Rackspace, it shows
that azure is still on 2nd number and they both have been more trending than any other
cloud vendors.
But, let me tell you an interesting fact that, from the past survey by Forbes.com, Azure
surpassed Amazon in Cloud revenue from 6 billion dollars to 5.44 billion dollars.
This is the survey report of April 2018.
Sounds Convincing?
Right?
Now what we can conclude from the fact that
aws is on the first place as a cloud provider is that it obviously has a bigger community
support and trust across its clients.
This is the reason why AWS has more high-profile customers like Netflix, Airbnb, Unilever,
BMW, Samsung, MI, Zynga, etc.
No doubt, azure is also not that behind as almost 80% of the fortune 500 companies have
put their faiths in azure recently.
Some of its major clients are Johnson Controls, Polycom, Fujifilm, HP, Honeywell, Apple etc.
So, isn't it quite impressive for a public cloud provider that's relatively new when
compared to a title holder such as AWS?
Now after discussing their establishment in the market, let's talk about what each provider
has to offer in terms of services.
The services which I am going to compare here,
comes under the following domains: Compute
Database Storage
Security Networking
Monitoring Development
and Internet of things AWS and Azure both covers like 100+ services.
So, in these domains some of the services that AWS covers are AWS EC2, AWS RDS, AWS
S3, AWS IAM, AWS VPC, AWS CloudWatch, AWS Cloud9, AWS IoT Core and many more.
Similarly, Azure covers the services like Virtual Machine, SQL Database, Blob Storage,
Azure Active Directory, Virtual Network, Azure Monitor, Visual Studio, Azure IOT hub and
many more
Now another factor is its integration with the open source tools.
Amazon has had quite better relations with the open-source communities, leading to more
open-source integrations with AWS, which includes open-source tools like Jenkins, Docker, Ansible,
Github and it's also friendlier when it comes to Linux servers.
In case of azure, it offers native integrations for windows development tools such as VBS,
SQL database, Active Directory.
We all know, when it comes to open-source, Microsoft hasn't always embraced this model,
but recently they have been catching up with it and, now the organizations can run Redhat
Enterprise Linux edition and Hadoop clusters in Azure.
After Discussing their services, now let's check their pricing models.
In case of AWS, a very basic instance which
includes 2 virtual CPUs and 8 GB of RAM will cost you around -0.0928 USD/Hour
Similarly, in case of Azure, it costs you approximately - 0.096 USD/Hour
Also, the largest instance offered by AWS is 256 GB RAM along with 64 virtual CPUs which
costs you around 3.20 dollars/hour. and in case of Azure, it also offers you 256
GB of RAM with 64 virtual CPUs, but it costs you 6.76 Dollars/hour, which is gets quite
expensive in terms of high usage.
Now let's move ahead.
So what kind of Job roles you get after learning
AWS or AZURE?
This is the frequently asked question by most of the learners in cloud domain.
Particularly, there are 3 roles in AWS i.e., AWS Sysops, AWS Architect, AWS Development.
If one is from an Admin background, then AWS Sysops will be the role that they should choose,
where they have to perform several admin roles in AWS like to create automating and repeating
deployments for networks and systems using the AWS platform with its features and tools
which are related to configurations and deployments.
Moving forward, AWS Developer is a role for the people from the development background,
where they perform operations on AWS services along with developing SaaS-based applications
and implementing concepts like cloud essentials, models, auto-scaling, high availability, load
balancing etc.
Also, for AWS Architect role it doesn't demand any pre-requisites, but it demands a prior
experience of 5-6 years or more in AWS Sysops or AWS Development profile in order to learn
and move into an AWS Architect role.
However, even if you're a fresher or have less experience with no programming knowledge
or prior knowledge and looking forward to learning AWS Architect, then you can, for
which you'll start your career as a junior cloud architect and then with a prior experience
and knowledge you'll be able to move your career into AWS Solution Architect role.
Similarly, in Azure, there are several roles like Cloud System Administrator who is responsible
for implementing and operating the VMs for Cloud Implementation, also to build and configure
Virtual Network, provisioning VMs, storage accounts, Databases, operate the Network Load
Balancers, configure firewalls and Scale-in or Scale- out the infrastructure etc.
Next role is application cloud services developers/software engineers who are responsible for designing
and developing different types of software application which can integrate with Azure
cloud Platforms, they uses managed services such as databases, storages, queues, caches,
workflows and more to bring new applications to the market quickly with the cheaper rates.
Roles like Devops Engineer (which is applicable for AWS as well) are the person who are responsible
for Automation of the deployments and configurations of your applications, DevOps is basically
represents an integration of Development and operations breaking barriers of Developers
and operations Engineer with a goal of streamlining the application lifecycle.
Such roles include managing infrastructure through version-controlled source files that
can be used to recreate Cloud environments in hours and minutes instead of weeks and
days under the traditional model.
The role that we are going to discuss is Cloud Architect.
Which is also applicable for AWS, people with prior experience in cloud computing go for
such roles where they need to possess strong understanding of how to design and build cloud
environments with enough reliability and scalability along with the security.
Cloud Architect must have a significant experience in designing, installing and to administrate
Virtualized Environments along with designing of disaster recovery and mitigation.
So, there comes more roles in Azure such as Cloud Sales Executive, Cloud Consultants which
demands a prior experience of more 5+ years in any of them.
So, guys who do you think is the winner?
AWS or Azure Well, most of you must have figured out from
the above stats that how Azure is rising at an advanced rate and is always at 2nd place
after AWS.
No doubt it may surpass AWS someday which makes it very difficult to declare one of
them as the winner.
However, AWs has been a consistent pioneer in the cloud services, its more mature infrastructure
causing less downtime each year makes AWS a preferable choice for majority of the users.
So, thank you so much for watching this session.
I'd love to hear from you guys that which one of them is better according to you? and
why?
Please reply to us in the comments section below.
Thank you and happy new year.