AWS vs Azure
Luc Bories
- 3 minutes read - 592 wordsOpinion – Comparing the Cloud Computing Giants
KINSTA is an American WordPress hosting provider that publishes in-depth blog articles on various themes. While reading “AWS vs Azure in 2021 (Comparing the Cloud Computing Giants),” I discovered several interesting insights to share.
Cloud Computing Players
The rapid growth in cloud demand has spawned an exponential increase in services and options. The broader your target, the more use cases you must support and the more products you need to offer.
Each cloud provider is building its own ecosystem of products, services and partners across IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service).
Although AWS and Azure overlap on many features, each maintains its own terminology and pricing model.
While there are many players in the cloud computing market, this article focuses on the two leaders—Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure—according to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant:
According to Canalys Q3 2020, these two providers account for half of all cloud computing spend.
The pandemic’s surge in remote work and e-commerce has further accelerated cloud investment.
Compute Features
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
- Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines
Both platforms deliver similar core compute services, though AWS offers broader VM import format support.
Differences appear in management tooling: Azure provides PowerShell integration, while AWS offers Session Manager.
Each vendor’s instance families are extensive, ensuring coverage of most workloads.
AWS and Azure each run an image marketplace for third-party VM templates. Only AWS, however, provides a public container image registry.
Performance varies by configuration and use case. A Cockroach Labs study places GCP and AWS ahead, with Azure in third. A focused proof of concept is the best way to choose for your workloads.
Networking Features
- AWS Networking Endpoints
- Azure Networking Endpoints
Offerings are comparable, but AWS’s larger physical data center footprint gives it a slight edge. Azure continues to expand rapidly to close the gap.
CDN services are similar, yet AWS’s DNS management features remain more advanced than Azure’s.
In latency benchmarks, Cockroach Labs ranks AWS first, followed by Azure and GCP.
Real-world testing is essential to uncover the optimal provider for your environment.
For deeper insight into Azure networking, see “Microsoft Cloud Azure: Everything You Need to Know About Networking.”
Storage Features
Storage services break down into:
- Distributed object storage: redundant key/value storage for unstructured data (Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage)
- Block storage: virtual disk volumes attachable to VMs (Amazon EBS, Azure Disk Storage)
- File storage: shared file systems (Amazon EFS, Azure Files); AWS offers higher top-end performance
- Cold storage: backup-oriented tiers (S3 storage classes, Blob Storage access tiers)
- Archive storage: long-term compliance or analytics archives (S3 archival classes, Blob Storage access tiers)
Overall, AWS and Azure provide comparable storage portfolios.
Security Features
Security is a cornerstone for both AWS and Azure. Trust drives cloud adoption, and both vendors invest heavily in security across:
- Their own cloud infrastructure
- Customer applications (authentication, authorization, auditing, compliance)
- On-premises customer infrastructure (encryption, VPN, firewalls, SIEM, identity management)
The diagram below illustrates the full security scope:
Support and Pricing
AWS and Azure both offer extensive online support via documentation, use cases and community forums. Paid support plans are also available.
Given the breadth of offerings, a direct price comparison is impractical. Costs vary by region, compute hours, storage usage, data transfer and optional services. Use the AWS Pricing Calculator and Azure Pricing Calculator to model your specific scenario.
Conclusion
Every organization must determine which provider best aligns with its geographic requirements, feature needs, security posture, pricing constraints and support expectations.