Azure/AWS – All You Need to Know About These Cloud Service Platforms

The world of cloud management and modeling is changing drastically. We now have a number of cloud service platforms to help businesses manage operations and daily affairs in a much more progressive manner. When it comes to cloud service platforms, AWS and Azure take the lead due to their functional design and ability to deliver consistently.

AWS or Amazon Web Service is a cloud service platform provided by Amazon. The platform provides a number of different domains, which can help managers scale and grow their business over time. Organizations can use these domains to offer scalable solutions based on the cloud.

Microsoft Azure is another game changer in the cloud domain provided by industry giant, Microsoft. The platform provides services categorized as platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Both AWS and Azure have talented and visionary teams behind them, propelling the innovation they have achieved over time. In this article we shed some light on their capabilities and look at the slight variations across these platforms.

1. Computing Technology

AWS has a number of computers ready to perform calculations, computations and processing of data. The cloud service provider can scale upwards of thousands of nodes based on user requirements and industry standards. AWS also uses Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 as the primary option for data management of software container and for scalable computing. It also utilizes data containerization through Docker or Kubernetes.

Azure uses virtual machines for computing and calculation purposes. It utilizes virtual machine scale sets to scale for bigger programs. In software management, Azure utilizes AKS and has a certified container registry method for Docker container registry.

2. Serverless Computing

Serverless computing is a recent misnomer referring to a new execution model in cloud computing in which the provider dynamically manages machine resources and runs the server as well. AWS’s Lambda is the code execution platform built for serverless execution. Lambda reduces the scope of containerization by tearing down separate functionality and allowing spin ups.

Microsoft Azure is still a recent entrant in the realm of serverless management. While Azure has offered a number of functionalities in Platform as a Service (PaaS) over the years, they entered the serverless environment fairly recently in 2016. This addition helped expand the Azure platform forward and offered Microsoft Azure Functions to run arbitrary code.

3. Integration and API Management

Cloud integration services allow organizations to plan and create integrations between applications on the cloud, between cloud applications and on-premise applications and between different processes across the organization.

Amazon offers a number of key integration services through its AWS Application Integration Platform. This suite comprises of Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, GraphQL and Amazon MQ.

On the flip side, Azure offers Service Bus for simple hybrid integration of MaaS or cloud messaging as a service app. It also offers LogicApps which helps developers run powerful processes through visual workflow. No codes are involved in the process.

4. Batch Communication

Batch Communication is a completely automated process in cloud service platforms, provided for frequent programs that don’t require human intervention.

AWS Batch provides developers with a scalable solution to run hundreds of batches efficiently. The program recognizes the separate needs of every program and offers the optimal computing resources required to handle that specific application. The resources include optimized memory and CPU power. AWS Batch cancels out the need to install separate batch computing software and allows organizations to analyze results from actionable insights.

Azure Batch does parallel AWS Batch in the amount of large-scale and high-performing apps it can run at one time. Azure Batch manages a number of virtual machines, schedules jobs to be run on nodes and helps with the installation of applications you want automated. The Azure portal provides an interactive and easy to read solution to manage batch requirements.

5. Object Storage

Object storage is our final point of analysis and will look at the approaches both platforms take toward addressing and managing data storage needs. The two common methods here include block storage and file storage.

AWS offers Amazon S3 or the Simple Storage Service here. This object storage service provides data availability, security, performance and scalability of the highest order. Organizations from all industries can benefit from this service to store and protect data for a number of use cases, such as web development, backup and restore, websites, archiving and big data analytics.

Microsoft Azure parallels AWS with its Azure Blob storage service. Azure Blog comes optimized with the right features to help in the storage of massive chunks of unstructured data in binary or text form. Blob storage offers features such as object mutability, strong consistency and geo-redundancy.

Understanding Key Differences Between AWS and Azure

Some of the major differences between the two include:

• AWS offers a temporary storage option with S3 for object storage. Azure also offers temporary storage as a norm, with Block Blobs for object storage.
• AWS offers Virtual private cloud, whereas Azure offers Virtual network.
• AWS is less open to third-party providers, whereas Azure is open to hybrid systems.
• Azure has a more exact pricing model than AWS as they charge per minute.
• AWS has more configurations and features, whereas Azure is easy to use and integrate with on-premise solutions.

Both, AWS Cloud and Azure, offer similar kinds of service with slight variations in integrations they favor and the pricing model. Picking between the two is extremely difficult, as it all comes down to what your business requires and what its future goals are.