Overview

Amazon EC2

Stacks48.9K

Followers36.0K

Votes2.5K

Microsoft Azure

Stacks25.2K

Followers17.6K

Votes768

Amazon EC2 vs Microsoft Azure: What are the differences?

Introduction

Here, we will discuss the key differences between Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure.

Pricing Models: Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure have different pricing models. Amazon EC2 offers both On-Demand and Reserved Instances, allowing users to pay per hour or commit to longer-term contracts for lower prices. On the other hand, Microsoft Azure utilizes a consumption-based pricing model, where users pay for the resources used on a per-minute basis.
Virtual Machine Sizes: Amazon EC2 provides a wide range of virtual machine instance types, including general-purpose, memory-optimized, and compute-optimized options. Microsoft Azure offers similar variety but categorizes its virtual machines into different series, such as the Dv2 series for general-purpose workloads and the F series for compute-intensive applications.
Regions and Availability Zones: Amazon EC2 has a larger global presence, with more available regions and availability zones compared to Microsoft Azure. This gives EC2 users greater flexibility in choosing the desired geographical location for their infrastructure. On the other hand, Microsoft Azure is rapidly expanding its data centers to catch up with EC2's reach.
Managed Container Services: While both platforms offer container services, they differ in their offerings. Amazon EC2 provides Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), a fully-managed container orchestration service, and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) for managing Kubernetes clusters. In contrast, Microsoft Azure offers Azure Container Instances for running individual containers and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for managing Kubernetes clusters.
Integration with Other Services: Amazon EC2 seamlessly integrates with other Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings, such as Amazon S3 for object storage, Amazon RDS for managed databases, and Amazon VPC for networking. Microsoft Azure, on the other hand, provides tight integration with Azure services like Azure Blob Storage, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Virtual Network.
Identity and Access Management: Both Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure provide identity and access management services. However, Amazon EC2 uses AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), which allows granular control over user access to AWS resources. Microsoft Azure employs Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) for managing user identities and offers role-based access control (RBAC) for authorization.

In summary, Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure differ in their pricing models, virtual machine options, global presence, container services, integration with other services, and identity and access management solutions.

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Advice on Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure

Craig

Principal Consultant at Rootwork InfoTech LLC

Jul 16, 2020

Decided

We first selected Google Cloud Platform about five years ago, because HIPAA compliance was significantly cheaper and easier on Google compared to AWS. We have stayed with Google Cloud because it provides an excellent command line tool for managing resources, and every resource has a well-designed, well-documented API. SDKs for most of these APIs are available for many popular languages. I have never worked with a cloud platform that's so amenable to automation. Google is also ahead of its competitors in Kubernetes support.

200k views200k

Comments

Jerome/Zen

Software Engineer

Aug 2, 2020

Needs advice

DigitalOcean was where I began; its USD5/month is extremely competitive and the overall experience as highly user-friendly.

However, their offerings were lacking and integrating with other resources I had on AWS was getting more costly (due to transfer costs on AWS). Eventually I moved the entire project off DO's Droplets and onto AWS's EC2.

One may initially find the cost (w/o free tier) and interface of AWS daunting however with good planning you can achieve highly cost-efficient systems with savings plans, spot instances, etcetera.

Do not dive into AWS head-first! Seriously, don't. Stand back and read pricing documentation thoroughly. You can, not to the fault of AWS, easily go way overbudget. Your first action upon getting your AWS account should be to set up billing alarms for estimated and current bill totals.

264k views264k

Comments

Rodrigo

SRE

Jul 30, 2021

Decided

Albeit restricted to only a few places worlwide compared to its peers in the cloud segment, I am yet to find another provider capable of delivering a score over 5000 (Geekbench) in a benchmark on a single CPU machine, and each machine costs $6 a month. For homelab and experienced users who don't need DBaaS or IaaC's, it's a pretty straightforward choice. A more comprehensive review of Vultr's HF machines can be found here.

70.2k views70.2k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon EC2	Microsoft Azure
It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.	Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.
Elastic – Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously.;Completely Controlled – You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine.;Flexible – You have the choice of multiple instance types, operating systems, and software packages. Amazon EC2 allows you to select a configuration of memory, CPU, instance storage, and the boot partition size that is optimal for your choice of operating system and application.;Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to provide a complete solution for computing, query processing and storage across a wide range of applications.;Reliable – Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region.;Secure – Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon VPC to provide security and robust networking functionality for your compute resources.;Inexpensive – Amazon EC2 passes on to you the financial benefits of Amazon’s scale. You pay a very low rate for the compute capacity you actually consume.;Easy to Start – Quickly get started with Amazon EC2 by visiting AWS Marketplace to choose preconfigured software on Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). You can quickly deploy this software to EC2 via 1-Click launch or with the EC2 console.	Use your OS, language, database, tool;Global datacenter footprint;Enterprise Grade with up to a 99.95% monthly SLA;Web Sites- Get started for free and scale up as your traffic grows. Build with ASP.NET, PHP or Node.js and deploy in seconds with FTP, Git or TFS.;Infrastructure Services- Access scalable, on-demand infrastructure using Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks. Take advantage of what you already know to achieve new capabilities in the cloud.;Mobile Services- App development with a scalable and secure backend hosted in Windows Azure. Incorporate structured storage, user authentication and push notifications in minutes.;Cloud Services- Create highly-available, infinitely scalable applications and services using a rich Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment. Support multi-tier scenarios, automated deployments and elastic scale.;Big Data- Process, analyze, and gain new insights from big data using the power of Apache Hadoop.;Media- Create, manage and distribute media in the cloud. This PaaS offering provides everything from encoding to content protection to streaming and analytics support.
Statistics
Stacks 48.9K	Stacks 25.2K
Followers 36.0K	Followers 17.6K
Votes 2.5K	Votes 768
Pros & Cons
Pros 647 Quick and reliable cloud servers 515 Scalability 393 Easy management 277 Low cost 271 Auto-scaling Cons 14 Ui could use a lot of work 6 High learning curve when compared to PaaS 3 Extremely poor CPU performance	Pros 114 Scales well and quite easy 96 Can use .Net or open source tools 81 Startup friendly 73 Startup plans via BizSpark 62 High performance Cons 7 Confusing UI 2 Expensive plesk on Azure
Integrations
No integrations available	New Relic Twilio SendGrid Cloudinary Redis Cloud Bitnami AWS Cloud9 MongoLab AppDynamics Cloudant CopperEgg

What are some alternatives to Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure?

DigitalOcean

We take the complexities out of cloud hosting by offering blazing fast, on-demand SSD cloud servers, straightforward pricing, a simple API, and an easy-to-use control panel.

Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine is a service that provides virtual machines that run on Google infrastructure. Google Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run up to thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed from the ground up to be fast, and to offer strong consistency of performance.

Linode

Get a server running in minutes with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and node location.

Scaleway

European cloud computing company proposing a complete & simple public cloud ecosystem, bare-metal servers & private datacenter infrastructures.

Rackspace Cloud Servers

Cloud Servers is based on OpenStack, the open and scalable operating system for building public and private clouds. With the open cloud, you get reliable cloud hosting, without locking your data into one proprietary platform.

Google Cloud Platform

It helps you build what's next with secure infrastructure, developer tools, APIs, data analytics and machine learning. It is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search and YouTube.

Gandi

Gandi VPS Cloud Hosting offers you a flexible server with dedicated resources. The VPS virtualization is made possible by Xen technology.

WebFaction

No need to spend hours installing and configuring the software, database and other tools. We have over 50 one-click installers in our control panel.

Joyent Cloud

Joyent is the high-performance cloud infrastructure company, offering the only solution specifically built to power real-time web and mobile applications.

Vultr

Strategically located in 16 datacenters around the globe and provides frictionless provisioning of public cloud, storage and single-tenant bare metal.