Amazon S3 vs Azure Storage

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Amazon S3

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Amazon S3 vs Azure Storage: What are the differences?

Developers describe Amazon S3 as "Store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web". Amazon Simple Storage Service provides a fully redundant data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. On the other hand, Azure Storage is detailed as "Reliable, economical cloud storage for data big and small". Azure Storage provides the flexibility to store and retrieve large amounts of unstructured data, such as documents and media files with Azure Blobs; structured nosql based data with Azure Tables; reliable messages with Azure Queues, and use SMB based Azure Files for migrating on-premises applications to the cloud.

Amazon S3 and Azure Storage can be categorized as "Cloud Storage" tools.

Some of the features offered by Amazon S3 are:

  • Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 terabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.
  • Each object is stored in a bucket and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key.
  • A bucket can be stored in one of several Regions. You can choose a Region to optimize for latency, minimize costs, or address regulatory requirements. Amazon S3 is currently available in the US Standard, US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), South America (Sao Paulo), and GovCloud (US) Regions. The US Standard Region automatically routes requests to facilities in Northern Virginia or the Pacific Northwest using network maps.

On the other hand, Azure Storage provides the following key features:

  • Blobs, Tables, Queues, and Files
  • Highly scalable
  • Durable & highly available

"Reliable" is the primary reason why developers consider Amazon S3 over the competitors, whereas "All-in-one storage solution" was stated as the key factor in picking Azure Storage.

reddit, Instacart, and Lyft are some of the popular companies that use Amazon S3, whereas Azure Storage is used by Starbucks, Yammer, and Microsoft. Amazon S3 has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3194 company stacks & 1559 developers stacks; compared to Azure Storage, which is listed in 82 company stacks and 42 developer stacks.

Advice on Amazon S3 and Azure Storage

Hello! I have a mobile app with nearly 100k MAU, and I want to add a cloud file storage service to my app.

My app will allow users to store their image, video, and audio files and retrieve them to their device when necessary.

I have already decided to use PHP & Laravel as my backend, and I use Contabo VPS. Now, I need an object storage service for my app, and my options are:

  • Amazon S3 : It sounds to me like the best option but the most expensive. Closest to my users (MENA Region) for other services, I will have to go to Europe. Not sure how important this is?

  • DigitalOcean Spaces : Seems like my best option for price/service, but I am still not sure

  • Wasabi: the best price (6 USD/MONTH/TB) and free bandwidth, but I am not sure if it fits my needs as I want to allow my users to preview audio and video files. They don't recommend their service for streaming videos.

  • Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage: Good price but not sure about them.

  • There is also the self-hosted s3 compatible option, but I am not sure about that.

Any thoughts will be helpful. Also, if you think I should post in a different sub, please tell me.

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Replies (2)
Michira Griffins
Software Developer at Codeshares Ltd · | 1 upvotes · 93.7K views

If pricing is the issue i'd suggest you use digital ocean, but if its not use amazon was digital oceans API is s3 compatible

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Cloudways Cloudways

Hello Mohammad, I am using : Cloudways >> AWS >> Bahrain for last 2 years. This is best I consider out of my 10 year research on Laravel hosting.

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Decisions about Amazon S3 and Azure Storage

Minio is a free and open source object storage system. It can be self-hosted and is S3 compatible. During the early stage it would save cost and allow us to move to a different object storage when we scale up. It is also fast and easy to set up. This is very useful during development since it can be run on localhost.

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Gabriel Pa

We offer our customer HIPAA compliant storage. After analyzing the market, we decided to go with Google Storage. The Nodejs API is ok, still not ES6 and can be very confusing to use. For each new customer, we created a different bucket so they can have individual data and not have to worry about data loss. After 1000+ customers we started seeing many problems with the creation of new buckets, with saving or retrieving a new file. Many false positive: the Promise returned ok, but in reality, it failed.

That's why we switched to S3 that just works.

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Pros of Amazon S3
Pros of Azure Storage
  • 592
    Reliable
  • 493
    Scalable
  • 458
    Cheap
  • 329
    Simple & easy
  • 83
    Many sdks
  • 30
    Logical
  • 13
    Easy Setup
  • 11
    1000+ POPs
  • 11
    REST API
  • 6
    Secure
  • 4
    Easy
  • 4
    Plug and play
  • 3
    Web UI for uploading files
  • 2
    Flexible
  • 2
    Faster on response
  • 2
    GDPR ready
  • 1
    Easy integration with CloudFront
  • 1
    Easy to use
  • 1
    Plug-gable
  • 23
    All-in-one storage solution
  • 15
    Pay only for data used regardless of disk size
  • 9
    Shared drive mapping
  • 2
    Cost-effective
  • 2
    Cheapest hot and cloud storage

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Amazon S3
Cons of Azure Storage
  • 7
    Permissions take some time to get right
  • 6
    Takes time/work to organize buckets & folders properly
  • 5
    Requires a credit card
  • 3
    Complex to set up
  • 2
    Direct support is not provided by Azure storage

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

What is Amazon S3?

Amazon Simple Storage Service provides a fully redundant data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web

What is Azure Storage?

Azure Storage provides the flexibility to store and retrieve large amounts of unstructured data, such as documents and media files with Azure Blobs; structured nosql based data with Azure Tables; reliable messages with Azure Queues, and use SMB based Azure Files for migrating on-premises applications to the cloud.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

What companies use Amazon S3?
What companies use Azure Storage?
See which teams inside your own company are using Amazon S3 or Azure Storage.
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What tools integrate with Amazon S3?
What tools integrate with Azure Storage?

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What are some alternatives to Amazon S3 and Azure Storage?
Amazon Glacier
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.
Amazon EBS
Amazon EBS volumes are network-attached, and persist independently from the life of an instance. Amazon EBS provides highly available, highly reliable, predictable storage volumes that can be attached to a running Amazon EC2 instance and exposed as a device within the instance. Amazon EBS is particularly suited for applications that require a database, file system, or access to raw block level storage.
Amazon EC2
It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Google Drive
Keep photos, stories, designs, drawings, recordings, videos, and more. Your first 15 GB of storage are free with a Google Account. Your files in Drive can be reached from any smartphone, tablet, or computer.
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.
See all alternatives