Akamai Cloud Computing vs. Microsoft Azure

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Akamai Cloud Computing
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Akamai Cloud Computing (formerly Linode) include scalable and accessible Linux cloud solutions and services. These products and services support developers and enterprises as they build, deploy, secure, and scale applications.N/A
Microsoft Azure
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.
$29
per month
Pricing
Akamai Cloud ComputingMicrosoft Azure
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Developer
$29
per month
Standard
$100
per month
Professional Direct
$1000
per month
Basic
Free
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Akamai Cloud ComputingMicrosoft Azure
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional DetailsCPU, transfer, storage, and RAM are bundled into one price. Storage capacity can be increased with additional Block Storage or S3-compatible Object Storage. Instant Backups can be added with complete independence to the stack. Linode NodeBalancers ensure applications are available.The free tier lets users have access to a variety of services free for 12 months with limited usage after making an Azure account.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Akamai Cloud ComputingMicrosoft Azure
Features
Akamai Cloud ComputingMicrosoft Azure
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Akamai Cloud Computing
-
Ratings
Microsoft Azure
8.5
Ratings
6% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Monitoring tools00 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Operating system support00 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Security controls00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Automation00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
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Akamai Cloud ComputingMicrosoft Azure
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Score 8.7 out of 10
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Score 8.7 out of 10
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SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
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Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
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Score 9.5 out of 10
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User Ratings
Akamai Cloud ComputingMicrosoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.3
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.4
(0 ratings)
9.4
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(0 ratings)
6.8
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.2
(0 ratings)
8.1
(0 ratings)
Online Training
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Configurability
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Akamai Cloud ComputingMicrosoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
Akamai Connected Cloud Linode would be a good service to host a content delivery network (CDN) because of its edge network but I'd prefer not to use Akamai Connected Cloud Linode for tasks that need GPU power such as Machine Learning or Artificial Intelligence (AI) because Akamai Connected Cloud Linode lacks deep GPU compute compared to AWS or Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure
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Actually, migrating to Microsoft Azure is a good solution for almost any situation, especially when all components of your network are ready to become cloud-based. The only drawback I personally encounter frequently is that older software packages cannot always be easily picked up and moved to Microsoft Azure in an optimal manner.
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Pros
  • Many locations of datacenter
  • Wide selection of pre-installed applications in the marketplace
  • Price is very affordable.
  • User interface in the account panel is easy to understand.
  • Fast server
  • Linode provides tutorials for new users thru Youtube channel.
  • Payment is per usage, not monthly.
  • Responsive customer service
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  • Azure simply provides end to end life cycle. Starting from the development to automated deployment, you will find [a] bunch of options. Custom hook-points allow [integration] on-premise resources as well.
  • Excellent documentation around all the services make it really easy for any novice. Overall support by [the] community and Azure Technical team is exceptional.
  • BOT Services, Computer Vision services, ML frameworks provide excellent results as compare to similar services provided by other giants in the same space.
  • Azure data services provide excellent support to ingest data from different sources, ETL, and consumption of data for BI purpose.
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Cons
  • The (new) 'create custom image' function needs a bit of work before it is useable.
  • New accounts have limited features until a support requested is made to turn specific ones on. It would be useful to have an account page that tells you what is disabled so unpleasant surprises are not had at the pointy end of a deadline.
  • Stackscripts would be better if it more info was transferred to the script. Eg the Linode Label given, plan requested, etc. But now I am just nit-picking
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  • In our experience, Azure Kubernetes Survice was difficult to set up, which is why we used Kubernetes on top of VMs.
  • Azure REST API is a bit difficult to use, which made it difficult for us to automate our interactions with Azure.
  • Azure's Web UI does a good job of showing metrics on individual VMs, but it would be great if there was a way to show certain metrics from multiple VMs on one dashboard. For example, hard drive usage on our database VMs.
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Likelihood to Renew
In this eight years of being Linode's customer, there hasn't been a single day we faced problem. Even the migration or maintenance activities have been planned, organised and priorly informed. Kudos to taking care of even such small metrics. Though the instances are unmanaged, the support team helps with relevant document links, or their own articles that help us to fix or solve the issues we face.
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We have been very satisfied with Windows Azure and now a lot of our business depends on it as more teams are now deploying their applications into Azure. Our next step is to have our Infrastructure team move their resources to Azure. It will take awhile for that to happen but we are positive that it will.
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Usability
It's pretty easy for me, but I preferred their old interface before it was called 'cloud' (not a computer science term.) The new interface looks easier but I had to ask for help for things I used to be able to find myself. If someone was new to it--without having used their old interface--it might be easier for them than it originally was for me.
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Microsoft Azure's overall usability has been better than expected. Often times vendors promise the world, only to leave you with a run-down town. Not the case with our experience. From an implementation perspective, all went perfect, and from the user-facing experience we have had no technical issues, just some learning curve issues that are more about "why" than "how"
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Reliability and Availability
There is very little planned downtime. Whenever planned downtime is necessary I'm always given lots of advanced notice and an explanation that I can pass along to my users that they'll understand. I really appreciate that Linode appreciates my commitment to reliable service to my users. It shows that they believe they've been successful when I'm successful.
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It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators
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Performance
Servers are well dimensioned and price performant. Of course one always wants more, so if they were to upgrade their hardware for the same price I'd consider moving more workloads. Networking - never had an issue. Hardware speeds - disks are fast and can grow to great size.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Support was excellent and fast. The documentation is extensive and helpful. I learned many things from their online documentation. I did not contact them by phone, but email took a day or less. Complex problems would probably need a service contract. I liked the friendly and polite tone of the support.
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Support is easy with all the knowledge base articles available for free on the web. Plus, if you have a preferred status you can leverage their concierge support to get rapid response. Sometimes they’ll bounce you around a lot to get you to the right person, but they are quite responsive (especially when you are paying for the service). Many of the older Microsoft skills are also transferable from old-school on-prem to Azure-based virtual interfaces.
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Online Training
We got kick started with an initial walkthrough along with some free credits. The initial walkthrough helped us to understand Linode's ecosystem and start our hands on with Linode. We tried out some apps from Marketplace initially with the free credits, which not only helped us understand Linode better, but also those apps. We had implemented many such apps to our customers with Linode
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No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
We're a small organization. The implementation of our Linode solution was trivial. Once I justified a cloud server to my bosses over a co-location -- the co-lo wasn't as fast as our linode server in load tests -- it was a matter of moving one Linux implementation to another. Trivial.
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As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.
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Alternatives Considered
It is more user-friendly than the big three cloud providers like AWS and GCP. The interface blows them out of the water; pricing is so much more competitive—no egregious bandwidth fees like AWS. As a small startup, cutting out the overhead of ultra-complex UI and pricing dramatically helps. It seems to be matched tit-for-tat with DigitalOcean, and their UI is similar in many ways. DigitalOcean has more mature capabilities, even though Linode/Akamai was founded earlier. Linode/Akamai provides better price-per-performance, though, as DigitalOcean is expensive nowadays.
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I feel that Microsoft Azure typically outperforms Google Cloud Platform in hybrid cloud capabilities, integration aspects, and, primarily, security compliance features. Azure offered superior integration with Microsoft's enterprise software ecosystem, and it's second to none in my opinion. This made it the natural choice for most, especially if heavily invested in Windows, Office 365, or Active Directory deployments. We chose Azure over GCP because we simply needed Windows workload support as a strong driver, more access to global regions, and let's not forget that most tech teams in an organization are Microsoft Certified, which makes skillset transfer from on-prem to cloud a minimal learning curve over shifting to a different provider.
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Scalability
I completely agree with the above statement. Linode provides the best option in terms of configurations and scalability. We have chosen share CPU instances many times and then moved on with dedicated CPU instances, just with a click of button.
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No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • Over the years, Linode has enabled us to stop maintaining our own server hardware, and leave that up to them.
  • On the other hand, Linode provides a bare machine, and requires us to provide almost all of the systems administration effort.
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  • Times and growth went into it. By balancing on-premises maintenance with continuous cloud improvements, we’ve budgeted and planned endlessly increased capacity.
  • In today’s world of cyber-crime, clients can put even more faith in what they’ve heard. We built an innovative single-sign-on hub for all users. Also, other business platforms use Azure application gateways, reducing worker switching time and increasing productivity.
  • Its step can automate to improve the investment. In addition, we can integrate our organization’s credentials into an authorization for other systems.
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ScreenShots

Akamai Cloud Computing Screenshots

Screenshot of the interface to manage all LinodesScreenshot of the Cloud Manager used to create Linode instances, manage Kubernetes clusters, add backups to Linodes, deploy Marketplace Apps, or create Object Storage buckets.Screenshot of the fully-managed container orchestration engine to deploy Kubernetes clusters.Screenshot of dedicated CPU instances that run on their own CPU cores. No sharing the processor with other instances.