Public Cloud Computing to Reach Nearly $70 billion in 2015 Worldwide- IDC
Public cloud market is picking up day by day among organizations, as it promises agility, high scalability, maximum uptime,cost- efficiency, no single point of failure and remote access on the go.
This growing demand for public cloud hosting has led to the emergence of multiple cloud providers, but the market is largely dominated by two adversaries-Microsoft Azure vs AWS.
Gartner, in its recently published Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service 2015 has ranked Microsoft Azure as a leader along with its nearest rival AWS.
They both offer some common features of a public cloud like auto-scaling,compliance, self-service,security,instant provisioning, PaaS capabilities and more.
So let’s compare the two leading cloud providers on the basis of four core features-computing tool, storage, networking and databases.
Features |
Microsoft Azure |
Amazon web services |
Compute |
Virtual machines, Cloud services and Application services are the Azure’s main compute offering tools. They help you to build run and deploy applications, monitor failures, compute workloads, scale and manage and initiate new instances. | AWS’s compute offering focuses on highly customizable-Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. Other services include AWS EC2 Container service, AWS Lambda and AWS Elastic Beanstalk Databases. |
Databases |
SQL database is the e.g. of relational database of Microsoft .It is scalable, elastic and self–managed. It also provides data protection, premium performance and features programmatic DBA for developers.
DocumentDB, HBase, Table storage and HDInsight are Azure’s non – relational databases. |
Amazon Relational Database Service includes PostgreSQL, Amazon Aurora, Maria DB, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL.They are durable, available, easy to administer and cost efficient.
Amazon DynamoDB is the e.g. of NoSQL database. |
Storage |
Microsoft’s public cloud storage options include Azure Blob storage, Tables, Queues and File storage which are highly scalable and accessible, cost-effective and compatible with multiple programming languages too.
MS Azure has been positioned as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for its storage. |
Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is secure, durable and highly-scalable. Other storage services include Elastic Block Storage (EBS), Amazon Glacier and Amazon Storage Gateway which connects with on-premises environment seamlessly. |
Networking |
Azure load balancer (Layer-4 (TCP, UDP), is capable of delivering high network performance to the applications both on the local and global level, and probe the health of various server instances. | AWS provides networking services with Elastic Load Balancing service which distributes network traffic across the set of virtual servers. |
What sets MS Azure apart from AWS?
No doubt, AWS leads cloud market, but Azure with its organization-friendly features is growing rapidly.
Azure is ranked as a leader for both IaaS and PaaS platforms and storage. Unlike AWS, it leverages the benefits of hybrid cloud solution to its customers along with efficientsupport and easy navigation system.
Moreover, AWS’s identity service is focused only on its own cloud butActive Directory of Azure provides identity and access management cloud solution to thethousands of applications in the public cloud.
Gartner’s recent survey suggests that 64% of the users chose Azure for their relationship with Microsoft.
Microsoft’s relationship with its customers is the differentiating factor which edges Microsoft Azure from AWS.
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