Amazon EC2 vs Azure Virtual Machines

Overview

Amazon EC2

Stacks48.6K

Followers36.0K

Votes2.5K

Azure Virtual Machines

Stacks87

Followers82

Votes7

Amazon EC2 vs Azure Virtual Machines: What are the differences?

Introduction

Amazon EC2 and Azure Virtual Machines are two of the leading cloud computing services that offer virtualized instances to run applications or services within the cloud infrastructure. While they both provide similar functionalities, there are key differences between them that distinguish their features and capabilities.

Pricing Models: One of the main differences between Amazon EC2 and Azure Virtual Machines is their pricing models. EC2 follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users are billed based on the amount of resources used. On the other hand, Azure Virtual Machines offer various pricing options, including pay-as-you-go, reserved instances, and spot instances, providing more flexibility for cost optimization.
Supported Operating Systems: Another differentiating factor between EC2 and Azure is the range of supported operating systems. EC2 supports a wide variety of operating systems, including various Linux distributions, Windows Server, and even macOS. Azure Virtual Machines also support multiple operating systems, but the range is slightly more limited compared to EC2.
Regional Availability: Both EC2 and Azure Virtual Machines have a global presence, but the specific regional availability can vary. Amazon EC2 has a wider range of availability zones across the globe, allowing users to deploy instances in more locations. Azure Virtual Machines, although expanding their presence continually, may have certain regions where their availability is limited or excludes specific instance types.
Integration with Other Services: Integration with other cloud services is an essential aspect for many users, and there are differences in the level of integration provided by EC2 and Azure Virtual Machines. Amazon EC2 offers seamless integration with other AWS services, such as Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, and Elastic Load Balancer, enabling users to build comprehensive solutions within the AWS ecosystem. Similarly, Azure Virtual Machines provide integration with various Azure services, including Azure Storage, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Load Balancer, allowing users to leverage the full potential of the Azure platform.
Virtual Machine Scalability: Scaling virtual machine instances is crucial for handling changing workloads or high traffic demands. EC2 allows users to vertically and horizontally scale their instances, allowing flexibility in adjusting CPU, memory, and storage resources. Azure Virtual Machines also provide scaling capabilities, but they focus more on horizontal scaling by leveraging features like Azure Autoscale and Virtual Machine Scale Sets to dynamically adjust the number of instances based on monitored metrics.
Management Tools and Portal: The management tools and portal offered by EC2 and Azure Virtual Machines differ in terms of features and user experience. Amazon EC2 provides a comprehensive web-based console, command-line interface (CLI), and robust API support. Azure Virtual Machines also offer a web-based portal, PowerShell scripting, and Azure CLI for managing instances. The choice between the two may depend on user preference and the level of familiarity with each platform's management tools.

In Summary, Amazon EC2 and Azure Virtual Machines differ in pricing models, supported operating systems, regional availability, integration with other services, virtual machine scalability, and management tools and portal. These differences contribute to the unique features and capabilities of each cloud computing service.

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Advice on Amazon EC2, Azure Virtual Machines

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

Abigail

Dec 10, 2019

Decided

Most bioinformatics shops nowadays are hosting on AWS or Azure, since they have HIPAA tiers and offer enterprise SLA contracts. Meanwhile Heroku hasn't historically supported HIPAA. Rackspace and Google Cloud would be other hosting providers we would consider, but we just don't get requests for them. So, we mostly focus on AWS and Azure support.

156k views156k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon EC2	Azure Virtual Machines
It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.	You can create Linux and Windows virtual machines. It gives you the flexibility of virtualization for a wide range of computing solutions—development and testing, running applications, and extending your datacenter. It’s the freedom of open-source software configured the way you need it.
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.	Keep your budget in check with low-cost, per-second billing. You only pay for the compute time you use; Scale from one to thousands of VM instances in minutes with VM Scale Sets; Encrypt sensitive data, protect VMs from malicious threats, secure network traffic, and meet regulatory and compliance requirements; Choose Linux or Windows. Deploy your own VM image or download images from the Azure Marketplace
Statistics
Stacks 48.6K	Stacks 87
Followers 36.0K	Followers 82
Votes 2.5K	Votes 7
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 1 Flexible 1 Scalability 1 Free Tier 1 Low Cost 1 Backed by Azure

What are some alternatives to Amazon EC2, Azure Virtual Machines?

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.

Microsoft Azure

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.

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.

HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine)

HHVM uses a just-in-time (JIT) compilation approach to achieve superior performance while maintaining the flexibility that PHP developers are accustomed to. To date, HHVM (and its predecessor HPHPc before it) has realized over a 9x increase in web request throughput and over a 5x reduction in memory consumption for Facebook compared with the PHP 5.2 engine + APC.

Laravel Homestead

Laravel Homestead is an official, pre-packaged Vagrant "box" that provides you a wonderful development environment without requiring you to install PHP, HHVM, a web server, and any other server software on your local machine. Homestead runs on any Windows, Mac, or Linux system, and includes the Nginx web server, PHP 5.6, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Memcached, and all of the other goodies you need to develop amazing Laravel applications.

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.

Related Comparisons

Amazon EC2 vs Azure Virtual Machines: What are the differences?

Introduction

Pricing Models: One of the main differences between Amazon EC2 and Azure Virtual Machines is their pricing models. EC2 follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users are billed based on the amount of resources used. On the other hand, Azure Virtual Machines offer various pricing options, including pay-as-you-go, reserved instances, and spot instances, providing more flexibility for cost optimization.
Supported Operating Systems: Another differentiating factor between EC2 and Azure is the range of supported operating systems. EC2 supports a wide variety of operating systems, including various Linux distributions, Windows Server, and even macOS. Azure Virtual Machines also support multiple operating systems, but the range is slightly more limited compared to EC2.
Regional Availability: Both EC2 and Azure Virtual Machines have a global presence, but the specific regional availability can vary. Amazon EC2 has a wider range of availability zones across the globe, allowing users to deploy instances in more locations. Azure Virtual Machines, although expanding their presence continually, may have certain regions where their availability is limited or excludes specific instance types.
Integration with Other Services: Integration with other cloud services is an essential aspect for many users, and there are differences in the level of integration provided by EC2 and Azure Virtual Machines. Amazon EC2 offers seamless integration with other AWS services, such as Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, and Elastic Load Balancer, enabling users to build comprehensive solutions within the AWS ecosystem. Similarly, Azure Virtual Machines provide integration with various Azure services, including Azure Storage, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Load Balancer, allowing users to leverage the full potential of the Azure platform.
Virtual Machine Scalability: Scaling virtual machine instances is crucial for handling changing workloads or high traffic demands. EC2 allows users to vertically and horizontally scale their instances, allowing flexibility in adjusting CPU, memory, and storage resources. Azure Virtual Machines also provide scaling capabilities, but they focus more on horizontal scaling by leveraging features like Azure Autoscale and Virtual Machine Scale Sets to dynamically adjust the number of instances based on monitored metrics.
Management Tools and Portal: The management tools and portal offered by EC2 and Azure Virtual Machines differ in terms of features and user experience. Amazon EC2 provides a comprehensive web-based console, command-line interface (CLI), and robust API support. Azure Virtual Machines also offer a web-based portal, PowerShell scripting, and Azure CLI for managing instances. The choice between the two may depend on user preference and the level of familiarity with each platform's management tools.

Amazon EC2 vs Azure Virtual Machines

Overview

Amazon EC2 vs Azure Virtual Machines: What are the differences?