Batman vs Superman. Captain America vs Iron Man. Icon vs icon. Good guy vs good guy. The best vs the best.

These match-ups are some of the most compellingever seen in film. The two most profitable corporations in the world of technology are in a similar competition over cloud computing. Microsoft Azure against Amazon Web Services (AWS). If you're looking for the best cloud service, it comes down to these two. 

Moving your applications, databases, and other digital content off-site to shared servers hosted in the cloud will make managing your entire office IT infrastructure easier and more economical.

To be defined as a “public” cloud, a cloud-hosted server needs to have a “shared” aspect, which Azure and AWS have. Also, both have all of the public cloud’s key benefits, as leaders in the field. 

However, Amazon shines with open source developers welcoming Linux users and offering several integrations for open source apps, whereas Microsoft has been very closed to open source applications which has turned a lot of companies off.

Amazon entered cloud computing services a bit earlier than Microsoft, which comes as no surprise that AWS has the larger portion of the public cloud market. Azure has only been a market player starting 2010.  

AWS

All the basic essentials of cloud computing are well used in both Azure and AWS; they’re just labeled differently.

AWS has a range of offerings that fall under Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), grouped into four classes:

• content delivery and storage
• compute
• networking
• database

AWS offers a wider range of functionality with more features and configurations. But, it requires more hands-on management -- at least at the outset, when there is a steeper learning curve.

Microsoft Azure

Azure, on the other hand, also has four classes of offerings:

• data management and databases
• compute
• networking
• performance

Azure’s four-menu list of offerings is almost identical, but they place data management and database first. They also list performance as their fourth essential, which might sound more appealing to enterprises like yours.

Your learning curve with Azure will be a gradual one. So, it will seem more like you’re running some new plug-and-play software than installing a whole new system on Windows.

Azure offers programming tools, which is great for businesses developing their own applications, allowing access into all of its available features. It also offers PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) alongside the customary SaaS (Software-as-a-Service).

You will find that most of the features offered on Azure have a corresponding or similar feature on AWS. Choosing between the two really depends on what you need. 

Which one is better? There’s simply no definitive answer. Both AWS and Azure have free offerings and trials, so give each one a test run and SimplyClouds can help you get a feel for what to pick!

If you have any questions regarding Microsoft Azure vs AWS, just give us a call. There are no strings attached here at SimplyClouds, just down-to-earth insights from our cloud experts.