Comparing Cloud Vendors — Infrastructure Services
This is the second post in the series. Please see the first one. In this, I will focus on Infrastructure. Infrastructure services include Compute, Storage, Database and Networking.
Disclaimer: This is not an indepth analysis of all products, just a high-level comparison of offering suite. The main aim here is to inspire discussion and hear differing views.
Note: I took products from AWS Products page and Azure Products page — if something is missing here, its because that product is not found there ( or I made a mistake :)- do let me know ).
Compute:
The main products/services in compute are:
Advantage: Slightly AWS
In Event Driven Compute, AWS has slight advantage as Lambda is released much before Azure functions ( which is still in Preview). I believe Event Driven Compute is going to grow more.
Storage & Content Delivery
The main products/services in Storage & Content Delivery are:
Advantage: Tie, depends on enterprise adoption pattern ( new dev or migration )
Database
The main product/services in Database are:
Given Microsoft’s experience, they tend to have an edge over AWS with enterprises using SQL Server. AWS has more options in RDS including ability to run MySQL, MariaDB, Postgres, Oracle and AuroraDB.
Microsoft make it easy to stretch your onprem DB to Cloud with SQL Server Stretch DB, which would be appealing to enterprises already using SQL Server.
Advantage: AWS ( for heterogeneous support )
Networking
The main products/services in Networking are:
Advantage: Tie
Microsoft has products/services like Traffic Manager and Application Gateway that I could not find in AWS, but AWS has operated networking products for much longer and they are mature.
Summary
While differences exist at each product level and some products on AWS are more mature than Azure and vice versa, it is my opinion that at infrastructure services, both AWS and Azure are comparable. It would really come down to organization pattern for Cloud adoption. Are they looking for a smooth migration or are they rewriting apps for Cloud and are willing to take some initial learning curve for lot of innovation benefit?.
Thoughts? If you want to offer a clarification or disagree with this, tweet or reply here and where appropriate, I will note it here.
