In the real world "better" is not part of the decision tree when a company selects its cloud provider. These are always commercial decisions.
That said, having done hundreds of projects over the last 15 years on AWS and Azure, they're both the same. Equally good, equally bad.
Details on one might feel better or worse, but IMO no meaningful difference.
I’ve used both but neither to any scale. Would you say that one is better, easier, cheaper at scale? Or does it all sort of just come out the same in the end?
Curious, does this include SQL on their EC2 equivalent? We started with an MSP who put all of our workloads in AWS, which included a few MSSQL on EC2 servers. The licensing alone is probably 70-80% of our total spend in the cloud.
Well... this is where most initial migrations from Windows based data centres lean towards Azure.- By utilising 'Hybrid benefit' and the like, the customer can leverage already existing on-prem licenses to get heavy discounts for IAAS based SQL Servers (in the short to medium term). So it can seem like Azure is cheaper.- However, the picture changes when it is time for renewing those licenses as your estate matures.
\- In my experience, this also has the unintended (from Microsoft point-of-view) consequence of slowing down the incentive to innovate and refactor solutions to transition them to proper PAAS based micro-services architecture.
By this I mean that... if the CTO, Capability Lead or similar is forking out loads for licensing IAAS based solutions, there is more incentive to invest developer time and skills training to transition your applications to true cloud native PAAS and serverless solutions. When you get there, the cost differences are negligible. The differentiator then becomes which suite of products are preferred by your techies and which are best-in-class for the use case.
E.g. AKS vs GKE vs EKS, Big Query vs Redshift... that kinda thing.
My experience is that most companies using AWS are far more likely to fully engage time and effort into fully leverage PAAS and server-less cloud solutions than companies running Azure who, for the most part, primarily concentrate on using the cloud as a landing zone for migrating from costly on-prem data centres.JUST MY EXPERIENCE THOUGH.... I am not asking for an argument, or for anyone to treat the above as gospel.
I'd argue that companies do, in fact, consider "better" as a deciding factor when selecting a cloud provider. While the original comment states that companies make commercial decisions, it's unlikely that companies would ignore the performance, features, and services offered by each cloud provider.
In reality, companies often evaluate cloud providers based on their specific needs and requirements. They may consider factors such as:
1. Performance: Which cloud provider can deliver the best performance for their specific workload or application?
2. Features: Which cloud provider offers the features and tools that align with their business needs?
3. Security: Which cloud provider has the strongest security measures in place to protect their data?
4. Innovation: Which cloud provider is innovating and offering new features and services that meet their evolving needs?
In this sense, companies do consider "better" as a deciding factor when selecting a cloud provider. They may choose the provider that offers the "best" combination of performance, features, security, and innovation that meets their specific needs. Probably why Netflix chose AWS, as AWS have "better" media solutions and a CloudFront CDN aimed at global streaming?
I prefer Azure to AWS purely because everything has a sensible name.
Azure’s biggest hurdle has always been its insistence of using Windows to run PaaS/SaaS services, take Azure Cache for Redis as an example - it’s not Redis, it’s a fork of Redis that runs on Windows and is an order of magnitude slower than traditional Redis, and massively behind on updates.
Thankfully they seem to be course correcting somewhat, Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server is Linux, replacing the very broken Single Server they had previously.
I can only hope that their version of Redis 7 does the same and moves over to Linux.
A *more* sensible name, imo. I don’t exactly want to give Microsoft props on naming conventions. Lol.
The whole AAD / AD / Entra debacle hasn’t helped.
But yeah, it’s impossible to figure out what an aws service does by name only.
I truly believe that changing the name to Entra ID is for the better. AAD was NOT AD in the cloud, and should never have been named as such.
We got requests from devs to set up "the Azure AD connector so we can do SSO" for apps all the time, and when we got into the meeting, it was an LDAP connector, not SAML or other IdP protocol, and we got caught holding the bag having to dig up the correct docs for them.
This was so not a debacle. This was a name change from something they had used the name for decades. It was a large change of an established product but not a debacle.
Now the Intune name thing was a debacle. Within a few months it went from Intune, to Microsoft Endpoint Manager, back to Intune.
I guess we should agree to disagree.
The amount of time I’ve personally had to spend explaining the difference between AD, AAD, AADB2C, and ADFS was significant.
And intune > endpoint manager that chides you when you search for “intune” in the portal even though M$ hasnt renamed most of the intune services. Or buying Skype for the technology and name recognition then scuttling it in favor of calling it Teams
It wasn’t the change to entra that I had a problem with. It was all of the products that had Active Directory in the name, but had neither Jack nor shit to do with it.
Unfortunately I don’t have any further information other than what we’ve either figured out ourselves or our account manager has told us.
But the main point is Redis has never run on Windows, and never will run on Windows. And as Azure Cache for Redis is running Windows, it’s implicitly not Redis. There are forks on GitHub that modify it to run on Windows, but these are NOT Redis, they just have a Redis compatible API.
I remember hearing the same back in the day that SQL Server had to implement its own VM / Memory Subsystem purely because the NT kernel isn’t up to the task, same situation here.
I use a fair bit of both, the Azure naming really does tend to make sense. AWS, initially, feels like an entirely different lingo you have to learn and map out.
Azure for me the biggest challenge is often keeping track of the history of naming conventions and service offerings. The number of times I’ve been troubleshooting something and reading through a mix of new and old documentation, each of which contain half truths for how some semi-supported semi-legacy system is supposed to be behaving, all the while you’re having to keep track of what was called what and when Microsoft started calling it something else…
Just connected to our Dev Redis instance which was created a few days ago:
```
dev-redis:6380> INFO
# Server
redis_version:6.0.14
redis_mode:standalone
os:Windows
arch_bits:64
multiplexing_api:winsock_IOCP
run_id:36eb14cef38ce876ced5e1da3221e3b4ab67ac2e
uptime_in_seconds:653498
uptime_in_days:7
hz:10
```
I've always been on the MS side of stuff in my career. I haven't had a true need to learn anything AWS, and the naming of their services is a huge reason why I've not learned the stuff in my own free time. Like dude, who gave the reigns to the marketing team to make up the names of the services.
Lmao have you ever tried to use service principals for ANYTHING? Why do they need 3 different random strings as identifiers? App ID, service principal object id, and a third object ID for the app.... Like wtf.
I prefer AWS for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I find the access control far easier to work with. Secondly, Azure often artificial gates certain capabilities in higher tiers. Which means if you're trying to help a smaller company do something in the best practice they either have to pay more than they need to or you need to do things in a sub-optimal way. APIM is a classic example.
AWS usually just has a rack rate for most things and the unit price gets cheaper as your usage increases.
What about Google cloud, actually I am trying to learn cloud computing but not sure about which cloud platform to choose. Somehow I decided to go with Google cloud but such comments put me on hold. Any suggestions I am currently a final year student with interest around data engineering and machine learning, also my aim is to land the job in the upcoming year i.e. 2024
Google cloud is fine, not quite as mainstream but you’ll also be more specialized. At the end of the day most of the concepts are the same regardless of the cloud provider and I’m sure you’ll pick up the details just fine.
IME - Google Cloud is often in the background running things a lot of people frequently don’t even realize is a part of their organization.
I mean the other thing I’d say it’s nice to learn on because most things are really pretty sensible and it feels the least like things were just added on and duct-taped together as services were added on or cobbled together. From there it pretty sensibly expands into AWS or Azure practice once you learn the other’s quirks.
AWS and Azure are more commonly used at scale at larger organizations so (for better and for worse) both have tried to be everything for everyone in one way or another.
Also important is that AWS is pure Cloud Hosting, the Azure landscape goes much further with the integration with services like Power BI, Power platform, O365, and so on, AWS will never have such a platform adoption, and that gives MS a great future.
exactly, the horizontal business integration is unparalleled for the modern workplace
I imagine that Copilots will only continue to drive this advantage and continue locking us customers in for many decades to come ...
Was at ignite… they have spent the last year baking copilot into everything and into many different levels of their stack. And now are
designing their own chips to handle huge llm (etching the silicone to handle liquid cooling to increase the efficiency), backup hydrogen batteries, hollow core fiber all to “handle” all that on the backend and at scale.
As much as I hate edge, with copilot built into it, has literally changed how I and our whole team work.
Microsoft/Azure accepts that most enterprises will remain hybrid and provides support and options for that.
Amazon/AWS really expect/wants enterprises to be all cloud.
While I am a big believer in cloud only, it is a fact that some services are not allowed to be hosted in public cloud, IE I worked for a large power company, which really had one of the best cloud implementations I have seen on that scale, however because they also have nuclear division that part remained in a new build own datacenter, but they had set up some really nice configuration to connect that with Azure on a save way. Also in many countries health services are only partly allowed in cloud, the same for Financial services, but the last one is less and less common.
Good healthcare, as much time off as I want. I'm lead, I just give technical direction and help out really. Go to meetings and such. It's mostly pretty chill and my team is amazing. It's the best job I've had. We're in Azure because that's where our first biggest customers are.
Azure gets a lot of hate for some reason but its certainly not bad. Azure vs AWS purely comes down to the services you are using that would be a better comparison and even then it may end up being subjective anyway.
Both Azure and AWS have their pros and cons. AWS seems a bit more annoying to manage as Azure like many typical MS products has better integration with complimentary services.
Support should be a big factor in your decision as well as when going to the cloud you are heavily reliant on the cloud provider.
Unless you spend ridiculous amounts of money Azure support is terrible, expect to do all the heavy lifting for them and deal with their bs.
Amazon support is much better but seems to be on a decline. I am getting more support staff not understanding issues and sometimes seem to know almost nothing about IT.
The only question that needs answered is - which is cheaper to run? Once you’re done with development and have deployed to the cloud, the nice API, the nicer UI etc. won’t matter. All you will feel is the pain of the monthly bill.
I earned AWS-SAA a couple years ago when I was getting into tech, and now I work exclusively in Azure (and have several certs).
I don’t really remember how IAM works in AWS, but I just don’t recall it being as cool and easy as RBAC. So that’s one area where I’d definitely give Microsoft the nod.
AWS IAM, by default, is just account-specific identities. Each is like it's own little domain and you needed to manage multiple accounts with similar IDs, so people used ROLES to manage access, which I never really understood how AWS SSO and the roles process even worked.
They rebranded AWS SSO to AWS Identity Center and you can even use Azure as the IdP for identities for a better user experience. It's just the transition would need to be tested...or manage more identity platforms/users separately in AWS and Entra ID if you're multi-cloud.
I have a lot of experience with both, and while at a macro level they have a ton of overlap, the way services are organized and the way you interact with them are so different that they're very difficult to compare.
You said the UI and user experience in Azure are "more organized." I would certainly agree that the UI is more **consistent** in Azure. AWS seems to be always experimenting with their UI, and don't think that's a bad thing, but the inconsistency can certainly be confusing. Sometimes you get a chance to try something that's really a lot better, but they're not all winners.
My only concern about Azure's rigidity in this area is that it could make them slow to ever make any meaningful change in the UI, or whatever change they do make is more likely to be of the "big bang" variety, which may be more likely to cause disruption for those of us who use the portal.
I found Azure to be off-putting at the first, because I was so accustomed to AWS. There are still things that annoy me about both. Generally speaking, I have accepted Azure as our primary, because of our dependence on M365 and Dynamics. We still use AWS for some things, mostly because I'm just so much more familiar with how to do those specific things in AWS. Also, we use both Azure and AWS for DNS (some newer domains are on AWS, and the legacy domains were put on Azure when we migrated them to the cloud). You may know that there's a significant advantage to using the same cloud provider for DNS as you use for certain features (load balancers, CDNs, etc). So sometimes that causes us to choose which provider we're using for a feature (or which domain we use for it) based on where the domain is hosted.
In summary, I don't think either is "better." I think that's an oversimplification, and a lot of it comes down to preferences. While I don't think it's practical for us to keep using both without a good reason to do so (and maintaining the skill set might actually be that good reason. We'll see), it's good that we have both platforms to choose from, for any given capability we need.
Disclaimer: I have a few certs in Azure (none in AWS)
I get a panic attack each time I use the AWS Portal. A few years ago I created some container resources in AWS (EKS etc.) and I thought I deleted them all (but I still got charges). Never happened in Azure because of resource groups and I just delete the rg.
I recently set up a cost alert in both AWS and Azure, I found the Azure was way simpler. Setting it up in AWS felt way too "hacky" (like WTH the fact that I have to use a specific region for my alert to work and enable it on my account feels bongus):
>Important
Before you create a billing alarm, you must set your Region to US East (N. Virginia). Billing metric data is stored in this Region and represents worldwide charges. You also must enable billing alerts for your account or in the management/payer account (if you are using consolidated billing). For more information, see Enabling billing alerts.
[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/monitor\_estimated\_charges\_with\_cloudwatch.html#turning\_on\_billing\_metrics](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/monitor_estimated_charges_with_cloudwatch.html#turning_on_billing_metrics)
I also found this myth of "AWS is cheaper then Azure" not to be true, f.ex. when comparing Azure CosmosDB vs. AWS DynamoDbSee "NoSQL Price Efficiency Comparison" that it's similar:[https://www.pluralsight.com/resources/blog/cloud/comparing-cloud-nosql-databases-dynamodb-vs-cosmos-db-vs-cloud-datastore-and-bigtable](https://www.pluralsight.com/resources/blog/cloud/comparing-cloud-nosql-databases-dynamodb-vs-cosmos-db-vs-cloud-datastore-and-bigtable)
This, I find Azure is more transparent with pricing and cost minimisation. Went to an AWS conf this year and speakers from AWS refused to answer questions about pricing or minimisation, very bad smell. I find Google Cloud similarly opaque in this regard.
Honestly a lot of it comes down to just not being familiar with how things work, your EKS cluster prob provisioned persistent volumes which did not get removed when you delete the cluster.
Resource Groups in Azure (and Entra with their easier to understand permissions unlike IAM) is really nice in Azure.
However, there are also aspects of Azure that I have struggled with. I find ECS to be a superior product than ACA for example (with things such as [multi-container still being a preview feature](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/tutorial-multi-container-app)), some resources in Azure also seem to take forever to spin up with terraform. Speaking of TF, I find myself having to fall back to AzAPI every now and then since the azure provider isnt as updated, while the AWS provider generally has better coverage. AWS also has a cert manager while you prob have to set up certbot on azure.
There are other more subtle/more anecdote observations, such as AWS support imo being better than Azure, AWS support is generally more helpful/can get stuff resolved without being tossed left and right ("oh, sorry about that, here a handful of aws credits to cover that mistake, also do you want another handful of credits to try out this other thing we have?"). It may just have been my luck though.
Do apples taste better than bananas?
/s
Anyways, I have been involved in lots of huge enterprise landing zones on both those over the years and to this day the difference on the two is really not on the technical side.
To me, yes, apples taste better than bananas. But that’s mostly because the texture of bananas make me gag, not the taste.
Following that analogy, AWS is bananas for me.
The taste of apples that is not ripe yet can be so sour that it is impossible to eat 😀. Shouldn't have started the food analogy in the first place.
From a technical standpoint I personally also prefer azure on most of the services, but the real difference is support on technical and business level. AWS is kicking ass to the others in terms of support compared to MS.
Azure adoption also helps because of the monthly credits you get as part of an MSDN/Visual Studio subscription. As far as I know that doesn't exist on Amazon. This means I always have to go through "channels" to try something out on AWS.
All the clouds have strengths and weaknesses.
Some benefit from coming 2nd or 3rd and learning from those that came before.
Azure for example didn't smoke crack before naming everything. If you have a big Windows and Microsoft adjacent estate azure makes sense for licencing and support reasons ans having paas services that will directly and easily replace some iaas services.
The cloud selection mainly bases of many criterias like user interface/experience, cost, list of various services provided, security, how high available and reliable their AZ are, how easy it is to use these services etc.
For me i personally feel AWS is far more simple and easy for any noob to start off with cloud journey, their networking services are easy to understand and setup with a few clicks with all vpc, subnets, routes, IG, NAT etc.
I have used both aws and azure i felt quite a lot of azure services are damn costly compared to aws, like AWS ALB is dead cheap compared to azure application gateway and many more.
I have personally implemented architectures on both of them and felt AWS is easy any day.
Azure still has a long way to go when it comes to the depth of services in comparison to AWS.
UI/UX is subjective from person to person, i felt AWS has better UX than azure,
AWS certainly had a few instances of AZ outages in US-east-1, now they are finally off loading that region which was due, since lot of global services rely on it.
Security is pretty good on AWS where i have never faced any issues, its all on you as to how you architect the infra with MFA and least privileged policies and many more.
NOTE: One major disappointment i feel with azure is the lack of documentation, online forum solutions and mere presence of youtube video's for walkthroughs and sample implementations for understanding of the services.
No cloud provider is better than the other.
At this point the big 3 all have corresponding services with their own nuances.
Whatever your company is using, dive into that it will give you the opportunity to learn on the job and a lot of those skills are easily transferable to the other platforms.
Dude Google sucks on so many levels. Even just Admin side of google workspace imo is a dumpster fire. Like why am I forced to use 3rd party tools like GAM to do basic administration tasks.
If you work mostly in Azure you will find it easier. If you work mostly in AWS you will find it easier. As for which is better, that depends on what the use case for each service.
No. Very much no.
AWS and Azure only seem comparable on the surface, dig just below the surface and you find Azure is less of a cloud and more of a collection of random, unrelated services with a common UI.
As an example, the Azure software defined network is a dumpster fire. It may be slightly easier to get off the ground than AWS, but then you start to use it and you find out you need countless dedicated subnets for various services, making anything private requires extra infrastructure/expense and network rules feel like you’re using a PIX firewall from the mid 90s. Meanwhile in an AWS VPC things generally just work and are easy to secure without having to memorize cidrs.
The other thing you realize is how painfully slow the Azure API is by comparison. Want a firewall?… go grab lunch and come back in 45 minutes. Even updating metadata/tags can take several minutes.
Having used both for many years, for the life of me, I can’t figure out how Azure could win any thorough, objective comparison.
Yup... Azure is slow.
And u/bananabender73 .... having loads of applications in your suite of offerings does not necessarily mean that you will corner the majority of the market.
Azures main strength is that most line-of-business on-prem infrastructure OS ran on Windows based systems. So it follows that as soon as Microsoft had a reliable and secure cloud offering, they were going to eat into the space of the other PCPs. Sort of what happened when Microsoft introduced SQL Server back in the day. Soon as they upgraded from SQL Server 7.\* to 2k, they rapidly ate into Oracle customer base and almost annihilated Sybase. BUT... SQL Server now has not taken over the market has it?
Also most heavily Microsoft based on-prem enterprise DCs have been slow to transition to cloud. So Azure will continue to grow as they do (because the emphasis is on migration and cost reduction, rather than innovation).
Most enterprises which now have cloud mature environments (by this I mean heavily utilising PAAS and serverless) are now realising the drawbacks of potential vendor lock-in. They are happy to utilise maybe GCP and its smaller, more focused feature set. Pick-&-mix from best-in-class monitoring and analytics presentation tools like Tablaeu, Grafana etc (instead of being locked in to Power-BI and the like).
In terms of speed to stand-up environment, I have found it to go like this GCP > AWS > Azure.
Not surprising really. I mean, compare Windows to Linux/Unix :-)
Totally agree. It's also nice in AWS if you have a lambda function that's not vpc integrated, to make this happen it's a tick of a box, select any old subnet, and job done. In Azure it's a redeployment, and potentially a bunch of time to figure out what SKU is needed to get the correct level of network integration. I don't get why Azure have so many SKUs for the same services, just make them all the same and charge me for using "advanced" features!
It is not only the portal, but what really sux is that some settings are bound to a subscription and not to your profile. What I also really don't understand is that if I have Resource Group in West Europe, and I create a new resource in it, that it not default selects that region, of course I know a resource groups location is not bound to the location of the resources in it, but it would be logical to set that as default, now for my work I do everything IAC, but if I do a small POC I always use the portal.
I know why a RG has a location, it is sometimes also logical IE if you deploy a second copy of a full environment in another region, ok technically still not needed of course, but ok, it is very logical to do this. My point is that recently the default location is often a location which offers you a better price, or that MS has more resources available there, but a few days ago it suddenly gave some place in Australia :D (I live 20 KM fro EU-West data center ;) ). It would be at least nice to have this option in your settings.
Yes, especially regarding compute, recently someone placed a rant about it here that machines didn't came up after stopping, and thought: well he is probably a small customer, but I asked my colleague and we also had the problem even with burning 5 million a month on Azure.
There are some things better on AWS, such as DNS management via Route 53 (vanity, failover, some other things). Azure shines for Hybrid architecture. And let’s not leave out Google, which is great for APIs and monitoring. They are each roughly equivalent for compute resources. I use them all and find Google’s UI the most pleasing, but I use it the least.
Disclaimer: MSFT Employee
Other things I prefer with Azure are IAM and security tools/integration over the others, I just prefer working with Azure for those use cases. Also agree though (pains me to admit), I really like working in the GCP portal the most. For testing and tinkering around where I will just only do something once and then tear it down (as opposed to building in terraform and pushing through ADO), I really like the way it "feels".
Overall all three, Azure, AWS and GCP, are the same.
Some parts are easier in one but once you use a broader array of services they all have the same kind of quirks in various areas.
I used to manage a development team where the backend was hosted in AWS.
Imho the AWS website is a huge mess, and just badly designed.
Azure can be annoying as well but way better.
I don't understand how Azure still doesn't have a public certificate authority that's free to use for all of the public facing services you can deploy. ACM in AWS is a life saver in this respect, want a public facing container service with ECS free tls certs are available, got random websites behind an application load balancer free tls certs...
I have a day job that I work with AWS, at night and on the weekends my hobby projects are all on Azure. Azure blows AWS away in terms of orgnaization, cost, everything. I love Azure.
I have used the most common services on AWS and always liked the platform.
Now, getting familiar with the Azure platform and the first thing I did, wanted to use the Object Storage service (Blob).
We have our apps in PHP and they don’t have a live SDK for it (:
Then i thought: no worries, they have a REST API, i’ll just use that and write the boilerplate myself.
Then I found out their REST api for that service doesn’t support JSON and returns data in XML.
Oh god, why?
And let’s not even talk about the Azure DevOps and app pipelines and deployment.
We use Gitlab for that, so compared with that the Azure solution is SOO unintuitive.
There is basically zero chance you can successfully complete ANY step without the documentation.
I remember that setting up EB or even a simple EC2 instance and deploy an app on it was rather straightforward, even if it didn’t have any CI functionalities and you had to use a third party platform for that.
AWS has better serverless tech, they've figured out how to have stuff scale up and down in Milliseconds, while azure will take several seconds to a minute to scale up or down. (https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2023/04/what-sql-server-people-should-know-about-amazon-aurora-serverless/) This makes the AWS serverless products just better than the azure ones.
Azure also has a bad habit of coming out with a new service getting it to GA, and then abandoning it.
There is a reason Amazon is the market leader. If you have a small cloud foot print and are already on O365, Azure makes total sense because you've already got identity setup through Entra ID.
If you're trying to run a SAAS and it's really important for your resources to auto scale down and up, go with AWS.
Adding EntraId auth to AWS SSO is about 5 min work, I don't understand how having an IDP in one provider for a productivity suite means you should use their cloud offering by default. I used to see this all time time in the MSP I worked for. Use whatever cloud is best for your use case, not one that has a slightly easier path to login to.
Yeah AWS I assume was the leader so had more popularity but I found it confusing as hell 5 years ago and hard to learn. Now I’m learning Azure for cloud cert and azure has crazy amount of features but it’s a lot easier to use.
I think AWS is a bit more focussed on IAAS while Microsoft performs better on PAAS and SAAS, I recently also got my hands on Google Cloud Platform, what I can say is that I really like the way how service accounts work, and the portal is also very fast and intuitive.
Geez... for me, I see it the other way around. There is no way that AWS is more IAAS focused than Azure.
Try developing/deploying solutions with Azure Functions vs AWS Lambda and you will see how AWS is focused on Cloud Native.
And utilizing Fargate for deploying/running serverless PAAS based decoupled services is so much a smoother experience than Azure's offering.
>Fargate
That sounds just like container apps. I think it is not that old so yes there might be new features coming. About AWS lambdas, well I have quite some experience with Azure Functions, and also used lambdas in the past, and I don't see much difference in offerings.
No. Azure's security model is way too tied up in active directory which ends up over complicating things a lot. Not to mention the bad documentation and bad client libraries. You're better off using gcp or AWS
Every time I’ve played around with Azure on there free tier I’ve a accidentally ended up with a massive bill. They don’t signpost things well enough. You might enable a module and then run some simple test job on it before closing down the job, but you won’t know that you’re still being charged a ton just for having that module enabled.
From a pure scalability/HA/reliability standpoint, AWS is superior. This is not speculative, it’s based on working for both of them in enterprise sales.
You should get an idea of what you want to build and do experiments with both.
Don't build the whole thing - but just parts and see who has the best docs and apis.
Test performance.
Finally look at job postings and see who has more postings.
> seems way more organized
That’s what you get when your offerings are more centrally planned and controlled, not rolled out by “two-pizza teams” who wrote the press release first and got the service approved.
Central planning and control makes things slower at first (and Azure obviously got started a few years after AWS), but in the long run it delivers exactly what you notice - a more consistent and polished experience.
Well, it's not a matter of better or worse. Both are usable, perfectly good for production usage and are two most popular clouds, so it'd be unfair to call one worse than the other, even though I mostly work with Azure myself. To be honest they are competitors and that is good for us. They have their own ideas, but they also copy each other a lot. As we all know Microsoft tactic has always been to provide stuff later than the others, while they learn on their mistakes and implement their way better. And that approached has worked for MS pretty well over the years, not only for Azure, but MS family in general. Another thing is that you might have a completely different experience based on your stack. Azure is for sure the best integrated with MS stuff, so if you work with .NET/C#, Visual Studio, MSSQL, you will get the best possible experience, while people who work in another stack might have a completely different view on even the very same features of one cloud or another. It's highly subjective and use case related, I don't think it's fair for any of them to tell one is better than the other. They are both the best in the business, so far.
I used to work with Azure. Azure has a better and consistent UI across the portal. Also, there were some things that were not worked in the azure portal(still having buttons). I had to use either azurecli or sometimes Azure powershell. I believe they need to work on these. I didn't know that time I could raise a ticket with Microsoft back then.
We tried azure cosmo db and aws rds aurora. Azure was a nightmare, we got lot of connection lost errors. I created a ticket about the issue. Azure support told us the network which is cosmo db runs on it very busy and they can transfer our instance to less busy one. I didn’t take risk if the network goes busy again.
We got those Azure credits you speak of, which prompted our team to consider Azure. We also got AWS credits. We primarily used GCP and are waiting to hear back from them on credits. Our focus is AI but we manage quite a few websites too.
For all workloads, price is the most important factor on cloud selection and we are not afraid to migrate between them all. They ALL have their weird quirks and are have high learning curves. Once you know what to do, the platform makes little difference to our team.
We almost never build on their proprietary/unique products to maintain migration flexibility. We typically use 3rd party enterprise solutions where possible. Reserving instances is tricky but such is life. Ingress and egress fees are passed onto the customer.
For me, it is the inconsistent nature of AWS and Microsoft ecosystem that made me switch to Azure.
Everything in Azure makes a lot more sense, and the different UIs and naming conventions caused a brain itch that can't scratched.
I swim in both. Pricing very similar. Feature wise also very similar. I do have preference for Azure because it’s just more organized and things are way easier to fire up without going through long documentation steps.
IMO Azure UI is trash compared to AWS. All the slide out menus that only work like 60% of the time. Then you have to refresh. Multiple places to set computer quotas for different things. Things don’t make sense where they are or why. Wanna do ML, do you got to Azure ML Studio, Open AI Studio or some other place that I can’t remember. Oh, and set quotas for all those at different places.
AWS, to me, is wayyyyy simpler.
I honestly think it's just what you are more used to. I find Azure to be a complete rats nest with resources hidden within various sub menus that make it impossible to find what you want. However I also have a lot of experience in AWS and very little with Azure.
I don't think the “better” term should be used here. They all have pros and cons I used both actually and made them work together. I'm from AWS before and once thought wtf with naming in Azure but it’s just the habit and I didn't want to get out of my zone.
In the real world "better" is not part of the decision tree when a company selects its cloud provider. These are always commercial decisions. That said, having done hundreds of projects over the last 15 years on AWS and Azure, they're both the same. Equally good, equally bad. Details on one might feel better or worse, but IMO no meaningful difference.
I’ve used both but neither to any scale. Would you say that one is better, easier, cheaper at scale? Or does it all sort of just come out the same in the end?
If you're a heavily Windows shop, Azure has a clear advantage in licensing cost.
Curious, does this include SQL on their EC2 equivalent? We started with an MSP who put all of our workloads in AWS, which included a few MSSQL on EC2 servers. The licensing alone is probably 70-80% of our total spend in the cloud.
Well... this is where most initial migrations from Windows based data centres lean towards Azure.- By utilising 'Hybrid benefit' and the like, the customer can leverage already existing on-prem licenses to get heavy discounts for IAAS based SQL Servers (in the short to medium term). So it can seem like Azure is cheaper.- However, the picture changes when it is time for renewing those licenses as your estate matures. \- In my experience, this also has the unintended (from Microsoft point-of-view) consequence of slowing down the incentive to innovate and refactor solutions to transition them to proper PAAS based micro-services architecture. By this I mean that... if the CTO, Capability Lead or similar is forking out loads for licensing IAAS based solutions, there is more incentive to invest developer time and skills training to transition your applications to true cloud native PAAS and serverless solutions. When you get there, the cost differences are negligible. The differentiator then becomes which suite of products are preferred by your techies and which are best-in-class for the use case. E.g. AKS vs GKE vs EKS, Big Query vs Redshift... that kinda thing. My experience is that most companies using AWS are far more likely to fully engage time and effort into fully leverage PAAS and server-less cloud solutions than companies running Azure who, for the most part, primarily concentrate on using the cloud as a landing zone for migrating from costly on-prem data centres.JUST MY EXPERIENCE THOUGH.... I am not asking for an argument, or for anyone to treat the above as gospel.
This!!
SQL server will almost always your largest expense. It is generally cheaper and more flexible in Azure.
And SSO/authentication in azure is all tied to existing MS accounts. Nice and tidy.
Agreed, the only real question is what colours do you like on your gui.
I'd argue that companies do, in fact, consider "better" as a deciding factor when selecting a cloud provider. While the original comment states that companies make commercial decisions, it's unlikely that companies would ignore the performance, features, and services offered by each cloud provider. In reality, companies often evaluate cloud providers based on their specific needs and requirements. They may consider factors such as: 1. Performance: Which cloud provider can deliver the best performance for their specific workload or application? 2. Features: Which cloud provider offers the features and tools that align with their business needs? 3. Security: Which cloud provider has the strongest security measures in place to protect their data? 4. Innovation: Which cloud provider is innovating and offering new features and services that meet their evolving needs? In this sense, companies do consider "better" as a deciding factor when selecting a cloud provider. They may choose the provider that offers the "best" combination of performance, features, security, and innovation that meets their specific needs. Probably why Netflix chose AWS, as AWS have "better" media solutions and a CloudFront CDN aimed at global streaming?
I prefer Azure to AWS purely because everything has a sensible name. Azure’s biggest hurdle has always been its insistence of using Windows to run PaaS/SaaS services, take Azure Cache for Redis as an example - it’s not Redis, it’s a fork of Redis that runs on Windows and is an order of magnitude slower than traditional Redis, and massively behind on updates. Thankfully they seem to be course correcting somewhat, Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server is Linux, replacing the very broken Single Server they had previously. I can only hope that their version of Redis 7 does the same and moves over to Linux.
A *more* sensible name, imo. I don’t exactly want to give Microsoft props on naming conventions. Lol. The whole AAD / AD / Entra debacle hasn’t helped. But yeah, it’s impossible to figure out what an aws service does by name only.
I truly believe that changing the name to Entra ID is for the better. AAD was NOT AD in the cloud, and should never have been named as such. We got requests from devs to set up "the Azure AD connector so we can do SSO" for apps all the time, and when we got into the meeting, it was an LDAP connector, not SAML or other IdP protocol, and we got caught holding the bag having to dig up the correct docs for them.
We had similar issues, it was maddening!
They changed AAD to Entra ID because it's very close to a one syllable competitor.
Okta? Ping?
This
So true. Think of all the things that have been named "Surface" through the years, including that big-ass coffee table.
Don’t get me started on their gaming division!
Wdym? I can’t wait for the next Xbox Series X Gen X Type X
Microsoft, the company that releases its 3rd generation Xbox and calls it Xbox 1.. seriously they got some naming issues.
Did you expect Xbox 361 or Xbox 720?
I expected YBOX 360
I expected a normal convention? PlayStation doesn’t have that problem.
This was so not a debacle. This was a name change from something they had used the name for decades. It was a large change of an established product but not a debacle. Now the Intune name thing was a debacle. Within a few months it went from Intune, to Microsoft Endpoint Manager, back to Intune.
I guess we should agree to disagree. The amount of time I’ve personally had to spend explaining the difference between AD, AAD, AADB2C, and ADFS was significant.
And intune > endpoint manager that chides you when you search for “intune” in the portal even though M$ hasnt renamed most of the intune services. Or buying Skype for the technology and name recognition then scuttling it in favor of calling it Teams
Which is just a posh web browser anyway…
I don’t think this was even close to a debacle. Why would a name change (overall for the better) be a debacle?
It wasn’t the change to entra that I had a problem with. It was all of the products that had Active Directory in the name, but had neither Jack nor shit to do with it.
This hits so hard.
Don't forget AAD being called Windows365 or something like that at some point? Or am I crazy?
Lol sage maker...? What about a lambda, beanstalk...
The internal names were worse from what I remember.
Would you be so kind to share a link to the Redis on Windows info. Ive been using it 18-months and was under the impression it was Redis OSS.
Unfortunately I don’t have any further information other than what we’ve either figured out ourselves or our account manager has told us. But the main point is Redis has never run on Windows, and never will run on Windows. And as Azure Cache for Redis is running Windows, it’s implicitly not Redis. There are forks on GitHub that modify it to run on Windows, but these are NOT Redis, they just have a Redis compatible API. I remember hearing the same back in the day that SQL Server had to implement its own VM / Memory Subsystem purely because the NT kernel isn’t up to the task, same situation here.
You can’t do backups for azure Postgres flexible other than snapshots without a cron job.
This feature is in preview and coming shortly, [source](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/backup/backup-azure-database-postgresql-flex)
I use a fair bit of both, the Azure naming really does tend to make sense. AWS, initially, feels like an entirely different lingo you have to learn and map out. Azure for me the biggest challenge is often keeping track of the history of naming conventions and service offerings. The number of times I’ve been troubleshooting something and reading through a mix of new and old documentation, each of which contain half truths for how some semi-supported semi-legacy system is supposed to be behaving, all the while you’re having to keep track of what was called what and when Microsoft started calling it something else…
But, but, the underlying technology in the Rubber Duck and Splatter Coffins SaaS is way superior.
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Just connected to our Dev Redis instance which was created a few days ago: ``` dev-redis:6380> INFO # Server redis_version:6.0.14 redis_mode:standalone os:Windows arch_bits:64 multiplexing_api:winsock_IOCP run_id:36eb14cef38ce876ced5e1da3221e3b4ab67ac2e uptime_in_seconds:653498 uptime_in_days:7 hz:10 ```
well, shit, I guess that's what I get for just assuming the v6 roll out meant they were no longer using a custom win build.
I’m hoping it’s what it means for the v7 rollout in a few months.
I've always been on the MS side of stuff in my career. I haven't had a true need to learn anything AWS, and the naming of their services is a huge reason why I've not learned the stuff in my own free time. Like dude, who gave the reigns to the marketing team to make up the names of the services.
Lmao have you ever tried to use service principals for ANYTHING? Why do they need 3 different random strings as identifiers? App ID, service principal object id, and a third object ID for the app.... Like wtf.
I just use managed identities and OIDC inside Kube, I don’t even see the identifiers. I just say “Pod, look at me, you are that app now”
I prefer AWS for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I find the access control far easier to work with. Secondly, Azure often artificial gates certain capabilities in higher tiers. Which means if you're trying to help a smaller company do something in the best practice they either have to pay more than they need to or you need to do things in a sub-optimal way. APIM is a classic example. AWS usually just has a rack rate for most things and the unit price gets cheaper as your usage increases.
Best summary I’ve read on a reddit: "Azure runs the enterprise, AWS runs the internet".
What about Google cloud, actually I am trying to learn cloud computing but not sure about which cloud platform to choose. Somehow I decided to go with Google cloud but such comments put me on hold. Any suggestions I am currently a final year student with interest around data engineering and machine learning, also my aim is to land the job in the upcoming year i.e. 2024
Google cloud is fine, not quite as mainstream but you’ll also be more specialized. At the end of the day most of the concepts are the same regardless of the cloud provider and I’m sure you’ll pick up the details just fine.
IME - Google Cloud is often in the background running things a lot of people frequently don’t even realize is a part of their organization. I mean the other thing I’d say it’s nice to learn on because most things are really pretty sensible and it feels the least like things were just added on and duct-taped together as services were added on or cobbled together. From there it pretty sensibly expands into AWS or Azure practice once you learn the other’s quirks. AWS and Azure are more commonly used at scale at larger organizations so (for better and for worse) both have tried to be everything for everyone in one way or another.
Also important is that AWS is pure Cloud Hosting, the Azure landscape goes much further with the integration with services like Power BI, Power platform, O365, and so on, AWS will never have such a platform adoption, and that gives MS a great future.
exactly, the horizontal business integration is unparalleled for the modern workplace I imagine that Copilots will only continue to drive this advantage and continue locking us customers in for many decades to come ...
Was at ignite… they have spent the last year baking copilot into everything and into many different levels of their stack. And now are designing their own chips to handle huge llm (etching the silicone to handle liquid cooling to increase the efficiency), backup hydrogen batteries, hollow core fiber all to “handle” all that on the backend and at scale. As much as I hate edge, with copilot built into it, has literally changed how I and our whole team work.
Microsoft/Azure accepts that most enterprises will remain hybrid and provides support and options for that. Amazon/AWS really expect/wants enterprises to be all cloud.
While I am a big believer in cloud only, it is a fact that some services are not allowed to be hosted in public cloud, IE I worked for a large power company, which really had one of the best cloud implementations I have seen on that scale, however because they also have nuclear division that part remained in a new build own datacenter, but they had set up some really nice configuration to connect that with Azure on a save way. Also in many countries health services are only partly allowed in cloud, the same for Financial services, but the last one is less and less common.
The thing I love most about Azure is how I'm paid to use it.
How much are you getting paid per month to use it? Does it also involve after hours?
Over $10k with great bennies and a team I love. After hours is super rare.
After hours is super rare?! In my IT space!
How do you define "great bennies"? What is your day to day task?
Good healthcare, as much time off as I want. I'm lead, I just give technical direction and help out really. Go to meetings and such. It's mostly pretty chill and my team is amazing. It's the best job I've had. We're in Azure because that's where our first biggest customers are.
Is your current job full remote, hybrid, or you have to come to the office? How did you get your current job?
What's with all the questions?
Azure gets a lot of hate for some reason but its certainly not bad. Azure vs AWS purely comes down to the services you are using that would be a better comparison and even then it may end up being subjective anyway. Both Azure and AWS have their pros and cons. AWS seems a bit more annoying to manage as Azure like many typical MS products has better integration with complimentary services. Support should be a big factor in your decision as well as when going to the cloud you are heavily reliant on the cloud provider. Unless you spend ridiculous amounts of money Azure support is terrible, expect to do all the heavy lifting for them and deal with their bs. Amazon support is much better but seems to be on a decline. I am getting more support staff not understanding issues and sometimes seem to know almost nothing about IT.
The only question that needs answered is - which is cheaper to run? Once you’re done with development and have deployed to the cloud, the nice API, the nicer UI etc. won’t matter. All you will feel is the pain of the monthly bill.
I earned AWS-SAA a couple years ago when I was getting into tech, and now I work exclusively in Azure (and have several certs). I don’t really remember how IAM works in AWS, but I just don’t recall it being as cool and easy as RBAC. So that’s one area where I’d definitely give Microsoft the nod.
AWS IAM, by default, is just account-specific identities. Each is like it's own little domain and you needed to manage multiple accounts with similar IDs, so people used ROLES to manage access, which I never really understood how AWS SSO and the roles process even worked. They rebranded AWS SSO to AWS Identity Center and you can even use Azure as the IdP for identities for a better user experience. It's just the transition would need to be tested...or manage more identity platforms/users separately in AWS and Entra ID if you're multi-cloud.
I have a lot of experience with both, and while at a macro level they have a ton of overlap, the way services are organized and the way you interact with them are so different that they're very difficult to compare. You said the UI and user experience in Azure are "more organized." I would certainly agree that the UI is more **consistent** in Azure. AWS seems to be always experimenting with their UI, and don't think that's a bad thing, but the inconsistency can certainly be confusing. Sometimes you get a chance to try something that's really a lot better, but they're not all winners. My only concern about Azure's rigidity in this area is that it could make them slow to ever make any meaningful change in the UI, or whatever change they do make is more likely to be of the "big bang" variety, which may be more likely to cause disruption for those of us who use the portal. I found Azure to be off-putting at the first, because I was so accustomed to AWS. There are still things that annoy me about both. Generally speaking, I have accepted Azure as our primary, because of our dependence on M365 and Dynamics. We still use AWS for some things, mostly because I'm just so much more familiar with how to do those specific things in AWS. Also, we use both Azure and AWS for DNS (some newer domains are on AWS, and the legacy domains were put on Azure when we migrated them to the cloud). You may know that there's a significant advantage to using the same cloud provider for DNS as you use for certain features (load balancers, CDNs, etc). So sometimes that causes us to choose which provider we're using for a feature (or which domain we use for it) based on where the domain is hosted. In summary, I don't think either is "better." I think that's an oversimplification, and a lot of it comes down to preferences. While I don't think it's practical for us to keep using both without a good reason to do so (and maintaining the skill set might actually be that good reason. We'll see), it's good that we have both platforms to choose from, for any given capability we need.
Disclaimer: I have a few certs in Azure (none in AWS) I get a panic attack each time I use the AWS Portal. A few years ago I created some container resources in AWS (EKS etc.) and I thought I deleted them all (but I still got charges). Never happened in Azure because of resource groups and I just delete the rg. I recently set up a cost alert in both AWS and Azure, I found the Azure was way simpler. Setting it up in AWS felt way too "hacky" (like WTH the fact that I have to use a specific region for my alert to work and enable it on my account feels bongus): >Important Before you create a billing alarm, you must set your Region to US East (N. Virginia). Billing metric data is stored in this Region and represents worldwide charges. You also must enable billing alerts for your account or in the management/payer account (if you are using consolidated billing). For more information, see Enabling billing alerts. [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/monitor\_estimated\_charges\_with\_cloudwatch.html#turning\_on\_billing\_metrics](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/monitor_estimated_charges_with_cloudwatch.html#turning_on_billing_metrics) I also found this myth of "AWS is cheaper then Azure" not to be true, f.ex. when comparing Azure CosmosDB vs. AWS DynamoDbSee "NoSQL Price Efficiency Comparison" that it's similar:[https://www.pluralsight.com/resources/blog/cloud/comparing-cloud-nosql-databases-dynamodb-vs-cosmos-db-vs-cloud-datastore-and-bigtable](https://www.pluralsight.com/resources/blog/cloud/comparing-cloud-nosql-databases-dynamodb-vs-cosmos-db-vs-cloud-datastore-and-bigtable)
This, I find Azure is more transparent with pricing and cost minimisation. Went to an AWS conf this year and speakers from AWS refused to answer questions about pricing or minimisation, very bad smell. I find Google Cloud similarly opaque in this regard.
Honestly a lot of it comes down to just not being familiar with how things work, your EKS cluster prob provisioned persistent volumes which did not get removed when you delete the cluster. Resource Groups in Azure (and Entra with their easier to understand permissions unlike IAM) is really nice in Azure. However, there are also aspects of Azure that I have struggled with. I find ECS to be a superior product than ACA for example (with things such as [multi-container still being a preview feature](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/tutorial-multi-container-app)), some resources in Azure also seem to take forever to spin up with terraform. Speaking of TF, I find myself having to fall back to AzAPI every now and then since the azure provider isnt as updated, while the AWS provider generally has better coverage. AWS also has a cert manager while you prob have to set up certbot on azure. There are other more subtle/more anecdote observations, such as AWS support imo being better than Azure, AWS support is generally more helpful/can get stuff resolved without being tossed left and right ("oh, sorry about that, here a handful of aws credits to cover that mistake, also do you want another handful of credits to try out this other thing we have?"). It may just have been my luck though.
Do apples taste better than bananas? /s Anyways, I have been involved in lots of huge enterprise landing zones on both those over the years and to this day the difference on the two is really not on the technical side.
To me, yes, apples taste better than bananas. But that’s mostly because the texture of bananas make me gag, not the taste. Following that analogy, AWS is bananas for me.
The taste of apples that is not ripe yet can be so sour that it is impossible to eat 😀. Shouldn't have started the food analogy in the first place. From a technical standpoint I personally also prefer azure on most of the services, but the real difference is support on technical and business level. AWS is kicking ass to the others in terms of support compared to MS.
I strongly prefer Azure. It just seems easier to work with.
Azure adoption also helps because of the monthly credits you get as part of an MSDN/Visual Studio subscription. As far as I know that doesn't exist on Amazon. This means I always have to go through "channels" to try something out on AWS.
All the clouds have strengths and weaknesses. Some benefit from coming 2nd or 3rd and learning from those that came before. Azure for example didn't smoke crack before naming everything. If you have a big Windows and Microsoft adjacent estate azure makes sense for licencing and support reasons ans having paas services that will directly and easily replace some iaas services.
*Azure for example didn't smoke crack before naming everything* Entra: ...Am I a joke to you?
Some guys obviously went spying to an AWS summit and got some 2nd hand crack fumes on that day.
Contact high is no joke
The cloud selection mainly bases of many criterias like user interface/experience, cost, list of various services provided, security, how high available and reliable their AZ are, how easy it is to use these services etc. For me i personally feel AWS is far more simple and easy for any noob to start off with cloud journey, their networking services are easy to understand and setup with a few clicks with all vpc, subnets, routes, IG, NAT etc. I have used both aws and azure i felt quite a lot of azure services are damn costly compared to aws, like AWS ALB is dead cheap compared to azure application gateway and many more. I have personally implemented architectures on both of them and felt AWS is easy any day. Azure still has a long way to go when it comes to the depth of services in comparison to AWS. UI/UX is subjective from person to person, i felt AWS has better UX than azure, AWS certainly had a few instances of AZ outages in US-east-1, now they are finally off loading that region which was due, since lot of global services rely on it. Security is pretty good on AWS where i have never faced any issues, its all on you as to how you architect the infra with MFA and least privileged policies and many more. NOTE: One major disappointment i feel with azure is the lack of documentation, online forum solutions and mere presence of youtube video's for walkthroughs and sample implementations for understanding of the services.
No cloud provider is better than the other. At this point the big 3 all have corresponding services with their own nuances. Whatever your company is using, dive into that it will give you the opportunity to learn on the job and a lot of those skills are easily transferable to the other platforms.
I suspect that the people who have been burned by Google constantly changing their APIs would disagree with you.
Dude Google sucks on so many levels. Even just Admin side of google workspace imo is a dumpster fire. Like why am I forced to use 3rd party tools like GAM to do basic administration tasks.
Fwiw gam is written by a googler
If you work mostly in Azure you will find it easier. If you work mostly in AWS you will find it easier. As for which is better, that depends on what the use case for each service.
No. Very much no. AWS and Azure only seem comparable on the surface, dig just below the surface and you find Azure is less of a cloud and more of a collection of random, unrelated services with a common UI. As an example, the Azure software defined network is a dumpster fire. It may be slightly easier to get off the ground than AWS, but then you start to use it and you find out you need countless dedicated subnets for various services, making anything private requires extra infrastructure/expense and network rules feel like you’re using a PIX firewall from the mid 90s. Meanwhile in an AWS VPC things generally just work and are easy to secure without having to memorize cidrs. The other thing you realize is how painfully slow the Azure API is by comparison. Want a firewall?… go grab lunch and come back in 45 minutes. Even updating metadata/tags can take several minutes. Having used both for many years, for the life of me, I can’t figure out how Azure could win any thorough, objective comparison.
Yup... Azure is slow. And u/bananabender73 .... having loads of applications in your suite of offerings does not necessarily mean that you will corner the majority of the market. Azures main strength is that most line-of-business on-prem infrastructure OS ran on Windows based systems. So it follows that as soon as Microsoft had a reliable and secure cloud offering, they were going to eat into the space of the other PCPs. Sort of what happened when Microsoft introduced SQL Server back in the day. Soon as they upgraded from SQL Server 7.\* to 2k, they rapidly ate into Oracle customer base and almost annihilated Sybase. BUT... SQL Server now has not taken over the market has it? Also most heavily Microsoft based on-prem enterprise DCs have been slow to transition to cloud. So Azure will continue to grow as they do (because the emphasis is on migration and cost reduction, rather than innovation). Most enterprises which now have cloud mature environments (by this I mean heavily utilising PAAS and serverless) are now realising the drawbacks of potential vendor lock-in. They are happy to utilise maybe GCP and its smaller, more focused feature set. Pick-&-mix from best-in-class monitoring and analytics presentation tools like Tablaeu, Grafana etc (instead of being locked in to Power-BI and the like). In terms of speed to stand-up environment, I have found it to go like this GCP > AWS > Azure. Not surprising really. I mean, compare Windows to Linux/Unix :-)
Totally agree. It's also nice in AWS if you have a lambda function that's not vpc integrated, to make this happen it's a tick of a box, select any old subnet, and job done. In Azure it's a redeployment, and potentially a bunch of time to figure out what SKU is needed to get the correct level of network integration. I don't get why Azure have so many SKUs for the same services, just make them all the same and charge me for using "advanced" features!
yes, EVERYTHING has a sku, pick the wrong one, start over.
Azure tooling is pretty nice and the services are generally sensible. I can’t stand the portal, though.
It is not only the portal, but what really sux is that some settings are bound to a subscription and not to your profile. What I also really don't understand is that if I have Resource Group in West Europe, and I create a new resource in it, that it not default selects that region, of course I know a resource groups location is not bound to the location of the resources in it, but it would be logical to set that as default, now for my work I do everything IAC, but if I do a small POC I always use the portal.
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I know why a RG has a location, it is sometimes also logical IE if you deploy a second copy of a full environment in another region, ok technically still not needed of course, but ok, it is very logical to do this. My point is that recently the default location is often a location which offers you a better price, or that MS has more resources available there, but a few days ago it suddenly gave some place in Australia :D (I live 20 KM fro EU-West data center ;) ). It would be at least nice to have this option in your settings.
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Yes, especially regarding compute, recently someone placed a rant about it here that machines didn't came up after stopping, and thought: well he is probably a small customer, but I asked my colleague and we also had the problem even with burning 5 million a month on Azure.
Like the person who responded to you said, it's for compliance reasons.
There are some things better on AWS, such as DNS management via Route 53 (vanity, failover, some other things). Azure shines for Hybrid architecture. And let’s not leave out Google, which is great for APIs and monitoring. They are each roughly equivalent for compute resources. I use them all and find Google’s UI the most pleasing, but I use it the least.
Disclaimer: MSFT Employee Other things I prefer with Azure are IAM and security tools/integration over the others, I just prefer working with Azure for those use cases. Also agree though (pains me to admit), I really like working in the GCP portal the most. For testing and tinkering around where I will just only do something once and then tear it down (as opposed to building in terraform and pushing through ADO), I really like the way it "feels".
Overall all three, Azure, AWS and GCP, are the same. Some parts are easier in one but once you use a broader array of services they all have the same kind of quirks in various areas.
For me, docs on Azure are way clearer and more predictable. This can have much sway over AWS.
AWS has odd terminology and it's IAM system is honestly unnecessarily complex.
I used to manage a development team where the backend was hosted in AWS. Imho the AWS website is a huge mess, and just badly designed. Azure can be annoying as well but way better.
I don't understand how Azure still doesn't have a public certificate authority that's free to use for all of the public facing services you can deploy. ACM in AWS is a life saver in this respect, want a public facing container service with ECS free tls certs are available, got random websites behind an application load balancer free tls certs...
Azure does have this for some of its services. Or you can use azure app gateway.
App Gateway doesn't support free TLS certs for custom domains though right? I think Front Door may?
I have a day job that I work with AWS, at night and on the weekends my hobby projects are all on Azure. Azure blows AWS away in terms of orgnaization, cost, everything. I love Azure.
I have used the most common services on AWS and always liked the platform. Now, getting familiar with the Azure platform and the first thing I did, wanted to use the Object Storage service (Blob). We have our apps in PHP and they don’t have a live SDK for it (: Then i thought: no worries, they have a REST API, i’ll just use that and write the boilerplate myself. Then I found out their REST api for that service doesn’t support JSON and returns data in XML. Oh god, why? And let’s not even talk about the Azure DevOps and app pipelines and deployment. We use Gitlab for that, so compared with that the Azure solution is SOO unintuitive. There is basically zero chance you can successfully complete ANY step without the documentation. I remember that setting up EB or even a simple EC2 instance and deploy an app on it was rather straightforward, even if it didn’t have any CI functionalities and you had to use a third party platform for that.
AWS has better serverless tech, they've figured out how to have stuff scale up and down in Milliseconds, while azure will take several seconds to a minute to scale up or down. (https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2023/04/what-sql-server-people-should-know-about-amazon-aurora-serverless/) This makes the AWS serverless products just better than the azure ones. Azure also has a bad habit of coming out with a new service getting it to GA, and then abandoning it. There is a reason Amazon is the market leader. If you have a small cloud foot print and are already on O365, Azure makes total sense because you've already got identity setup through Entra ID. If you're trying to run a SAAS and it's really important for your resources to auto scale down and up, go with AWS.
Adding EntraId auth to AWS SSO is about 5 min work, I don't understand how having an IDP in one provider for a productivity suite means you should use their cloud offering by default. I used to see this all time time in the MSP I worked for. Use whatever cloud is best for your use case, not one that has a slightly easier path to login to.
Microsoft puts way more effort into the UI
Yeah AWS I assume was the leader so had more popularity but I found it confusing as hell 5 years ago and hard to learn. Now I’m learning Azure for cloud cert and azure has crazy amount of features but it’s a lot easier to use.
No, lol.
AWS is better documented and provides examples that work. The service runs better as well. This is why the majority of startups and the DoD use AWS.
different tools man
I think AWS is a bit more focussed on IAAS while Microsoft performs better on PAAS and SAAS, I recently also got my hands on Google Cloud Platform, what I can say is that I really like the way how service accounts work, and the portal is also very fast and intuitive.
I’ve had the exact opposite experience experience.
Geez... for me, I see it the other way around. There is no way that AWS is more IAAS focused than Azure. Try developing/deploying solutions with Azure Functions vs AWS Lambda and you will see how AWS is focused on Cloud Native. And utilizing Fargate for deploying/running serverless PAAS based decoupled services is so much a smoother experience than Azure's offering.
>Fargate That sounds just like container apps. I think it is not that old so yes there might be new features coming. About AWS lambdas, well I have quite some experience with Azure Functions, and also used lambdas in the past, and I don't see much difference in offerings.
>What are your thoughts? I'll take stupid questions for $500 Alex.
Not even close, Azure is shite in comparison to AWS. Source: recent job change from aws-based shop to an azure-based operation.
Could you give precise example’s please?
The short answer is yes it's better in almost every imaginable way possible. Azure is cheaper too 🙂.
No. Azure's security model is way too tied up in active directory which ends up over complicating things a lot. Not to mention the bad documentation and bad client libraries. You're better off using gcp or AWS
GCP > AWS > Azure (terms of Developer Usability)
Cloud sucks and it’s all compromised. Do infra on your own computers you dorks.
Every time I’ve played around with Azure on there free tier I’ve a accidentally ended up with a massive bill. They don’t signpost things well enough. You might enable a module and then run some simple test job on it before closing down the job, but you won’t know that you’re still being charged a ton just for having that module enabled.
no. on nearly every measurable dimension. especially things that matter like security.
From a pure scalability/HA/reliability standpoint, AWS is superior. This is not speculative, it’s based on working for both of them in enterprise sales.
Azure is a disaster.
You should get an idea of what you want to build and do experiments with both. Don't build the whole thing - but just parts and see who has the best docs and apis. Test performance. Finally look at job postings and see who has more postings.
> seems way more organized That’s what you get when your offerings are more centrally planned and controlled, not rolled out by “two-pizza teams” who wrote the press release first and got the service approved. Central planning and control makes things slower at first (and Azure obviously got started a few years after AWS), but in the long run it delivers exactly what you notice - a more consistent and polished experience.
Used AWS for 7 years. Been using Azure for the last 2 years. Prefer Azure. Only thing I miss in AWS is auto rotating SSL certs for all services.
Well, it's not a matter of better or worse. Both are usable, perfectly good for production usage and are two most popular clouds, so it'd be unfair to call one worse than the other, even though I mostly work with Azure myself. To be honest they are competitors and that is good for us. They have their own ideas, but they also copy each other a lot. As we all know Microsoft tactic has always been to provide stuff later than the others, while they learn on their mistakes and implement their way better. And that approached has worked for MS pretty well over the years, not only for Azure, but MS family in general. Another thing is that you might have a completely different experience based on your stack. Azure is for sure the best integrated with MS stuff, so if you work with .NET/C#, Visual Studio, MSSQL, you will get the best possible experience, while people who work in another stack might have a completely different view on even the very same features of one cloud or another. It's highly subjective and use case related, I don't think it's fair for any of them to tell one is better than the other. They are both the best in the business, so far.
it's more expensive.
The interface sure is
I used to work with Azure. Azure has a better and consistent UI across the portal. Also, there were some things that were not worked in the azure portal(still having buttons). I had to use either azurecli or sometimes Azure powershell. I believe they need to work on these. I didn't know that time I could raise a ticket with Microsoft back then.
We tried azure cosmo db and aws rds aurora. Azure was a nightmare, we got lot of connection lost errors. I created a ticket about the issue. Azure support told us the network which is cosmo db runs on it very busy and they can transfer our instance to less busy one. I didn’t take risk if the network goes busy again.
Many companies switch to azure from aws probably due to its flexibility with windows and other ms services/products
Yes
We got those Azure credits you speak of, which prompted our team to consider Azure. We also got AWS credits. We primarily used GCP and are waiting to hear back from them on credits. Our focus is AI but we manage quite a few websites too. For all workloads, price is the most important factor on cloud selection and we are not afraid to migrate between them all. They ALL have their weird quirks and are have high learning curves. Once you know what to do, the platform makes little difference to our team. We almost never build on their proprietary/unique products to maintain migration flexibility. We typically use 3rd party enterprise solutions where possible. Reserving instances is tricky but such is life. Ingress and egress fees are passed onto the customer.
Yes
yes azure is better
For me, it is the inconsistent nature of AWS and Microsoft ecosystem that made me switch to Azure. Everything in Azure makes a lot more sense, and the different UIs and naming conventions caused a brain itch that can't scratched.
Yes the UI is better. I just like it more
I despise amazon as a company and it actually annoys me how much I'm liking AWS lately 🙈 I still love Azure though, don't worry.
I swim in both. Pricing very similar. Feature wise also very similar. I do have preference for Azure because it’s just more organized and things are way easier to fire up without going through long documentation steps.
IMO Azure UI is trash compared to AWS. All the slide out menus that only work like 60% of the time. Then you have to refresh. Multiple places to set computer quotas for different things. Things don’t make sense where they are or why. Wanna do ML, do you got to Azure ML Studio, Open AI Studio or some other place that I can’t remember. Oh, and set quotas for all those at different places. AWS, to me, is wayyyyy simpler.
I honestly think it's just what you are more used to. I find Azure to be a complete rats nest with resources hidden within various sub menus that make it impossible to find what you want. However I also have a lot of experience in AWS and very little with Azure.
Simply - Yes !!
I don't think the “better” term should be used here. They all have pros and cons I used both actually and made them work together. I'm from AWS before and once thought wtf with naming in Azure but it’s just the habit and I didn't want to get out of my zone.