Overview

Amazon S3

Stacks54.0K

Followers40.2K

Votes2.0K

Microsoft Azure

Stacks25.2K

Followers17.6K

Votes768

Amazon S3 vs Microsoft Azure: What are the differences?

## Key Differences between Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure

1. **Storage :** Amazon S3 is an object storage service, while Microsoft Azure offers different types of storage like Blob storage, File storage, and Queue storage. Azure provides more options for different types of data storage, whereas Amazon S3 is mainly focused on object storage.
   
2. **Pricing Model :** Amazon S3 pricing is based on different tiers of storage and data transfer, while Azure Blob storage offers both hot and cool access tiers which provide more customized pricing options based on the access frequency of data. Azure also offers discounts based on reserved capacity, which is not available in S3.
  
3. **Encryption :** Amazon S3 supports server-side encryption with AWS Key Management Service (KMS) or customer-provided keys, while Azure Blob storage also supports encryption but has more granular control over encryption options such as client-side encryption and Azure Disk Encryption for virtual machines.
  
4. **Access Control :** Amazon S3 uses Access Control Lists (ACLs) and bucket policies for managing access to objects, while Azure Blob storage uses Shared Access Signatures (SAS) and Azure Active Directory for access control. Azure provides more fine-grained access control options compared to Amazon S3.
  
5. **Integration :** Amazon S3 is tightly integrated with other AWS services like EC2, Lambda, and CloudWatch, providing a seamless experience for AWS users. On the other hand, Azure Blob storage is part of the broader Azure ecosystem, allowing for easy integration with other Azure services like Virtual Machines, Functions, and Data Lake Storage.
  
6. **Global Availability :** Amazon S3 has a larger global footprint with more regions worldwide, while Microsoft Azure has a slightly smaller number of regions but has a strong presence in regions where Amazon may not have data centers. Both services offer high availability and durability guarantees but differ in their global presence.

In Summary, Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure differ in storage offerings, pricing models, encryption options, access control mechanisms, integration with other services, and global availability.

🔥 Trending in Infrastructure as a Service on StackShare

Pingora Infrastructure As A Service

Build fast, reliable and programmable networked systems (By Cloudflare)

Try it View Docs Alternatives

Try

0

4

Advice on Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure

Gabriel

CEO at NaoLogic Inc

Dec 24, 2019

Decided

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.

330k views330k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon S3	Microsoft Azure
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	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.
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.;Objects stored in a Region never leave the Region unless you transfer them out. For example, objects stored in the EU (Ireland) Region never leave the EU.;Authentication mechanisms are provided to ensure that data is kept secure from unauthorized access. Objects can be made private or public, and rights can be granted to specific users.;Options for secure data upload/download and encryption of data at rest are provided for additional data protection.;Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.;Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. The default download protocol is HTTP. A BitTorrent protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution.;Provides functionality to simplify manageability of data through its lifetime. Includes options for segregating data by buckets, monitoring and controlling spend, and automatically archiving data to even lower cost storage options. These options can be easily administered from the Amazon S3 Management Console.;Reliability backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement.	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 54.0K	Stacks 25.2K
Followers 40.2K	Followers 17.6K
Votes 2.0K	Votes 768
Pros & Cons
Pros 590 Reliable 492 Scalable 456 Cheap 329 Simple & easy 83 Many sdks Cons 7 Permissions take some time to get right 6 Requires a credit card 6 Takes time/work to organize buckets & folders properly 3 Complex to set up	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 S3, 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.

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 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.

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.

Google Cloud Storage

Google Cloud Storage allows world-wide storing and retrieval of any amount of data and at any time. It provides a simple programming interface which enables developers to take advantage of Google's own reliable and fast networking infrastructure to perform data operations in a secure and cost effective manner. If expansion needs arise, developers can benefit from the scalability provided by Google's infrastructure.

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.