Microsoft Azure vs OpenShift: What are the differences?

Microsoft Azure: Integrated cloud services and infrastructure to support computing, database, analytics, mobile, and web scenarios. 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; OpenShift: Red Hat's free Platform as a Service (PaaS) for hosting Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, Node.js, and Perl apps. OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.

Microsoft Azure and OpenShift are primarily classified as "Cloud Hosting" and "Platform as a Service" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Microsoft Azure are:

• Use your OS, language, database, tool
• Global datacenter footprint
• Enterprise Grade with up to a 99.95% monthly SLA

On the other hand, OpenShift provides the following key features:

• Built-in support for Node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, and Java (the standard in today's Enterprise)
• OpenShift is extensible with a customizable cartridge functionality that allows developers to add any other language they wish. We've seen everything from Clojure to Cobol running on OpenShift.
• OpenShift supports frameworks ranging from Spring, to Rails, to Play

"Scales well and quite easy" is the top reason why over 108 developers like Microsoft Azure, while over 95 developers mention "Good free plan" as the leading cause for choosing OpenShift.

OpenShift is an open source tool with 915 GitHub stars and 563 GitHub forks. Here's a link to OpenShift's open source repository on GitHub.

Microsoft, Starbucks, and Accenture are some of the popular companies that use Microsoft Azure, whereas OpenShift is used by Accenture, Vungle, and Hazeorid. Microsoft Azure has a broader approval, being mentioned in 497 company stacks & 472 developers stacks; compared to OpenShift, which is listed in 50 company stacks and 52 developer stacks.