Amazon Glacier vs Azure Machine Learning: What are the differences?

Developers describe Amazon Glacier as "Low-cost storage service that provides secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup". In order to keep costs low, Amazon Glacier is optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable. With Amazon Glacier, customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions. On the other hand, Azure Machine Learning is detailed as "A fully-managed cloud service for predictive analytics". Azure Machine Learning is a fully-managed cloud service that enables data scientists and developers to efficiently embed predictive analytics into their applications, helping organizations use massive data sets and bring all the benefits of the cloud to machine learning.

Amazon Glacier and Azure Machine Learning are primarily classified as "Data Backup" and "Machine Learning as a Service" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Amazon Glacier are:

• Low cost – Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost, pay-as-you-go storage service that can cost as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month.
• You store data in Amazon Glacier as archives. An archive can represent a single file or you may choose to combine several files to be uploaded as a single archive. Retrieving archives from Amazon Glacier requires the initiation of a job. Jobs typically complete in 3 to 5 hours. You organize your archives in vaults.
• Secure – Amazon Glacier supports secure transfer of your data over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and automatically stores data encrypted at rest using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256, a secure symmetric-key encryption standard using 256-bit encryption keys.

On the other hand, Azure Machine Learning provides the following key features:

• Designed for new and experienced users
• Proven algorithms from MS Research, Xbox and Bing
• First class support for the open source language R

According to the StackShare community, Amazon Glacier has a broader approval, being mentioned in 24 company stacks & 9 developers stacks; compared to Azure Machine Learning, which is listed in 12 company stacks and 8 developer stacks.