Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) vs. Azure Blob Storage

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) from AWS is designed for application workloads that benefit from fine tuning for performance, cost and capacity. Typical use cases include Big Data analytics engines (like the Hadoop/HDFS ecosystem and Amazon EMR clusters), relational and NoSQL databases (like Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL or Cassandra and MongoDB), stream and log processing applications (like Kafka and Splunk), and data warehousing applications (like Vertica and Teradata).N/A
Azure Blob Storage
Score 9.7 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft's Blob Storage system on Azure is designed to make unstructured data available to customers anywhere through REST-based object storage.
$0.01
per GB/per month
Pricing
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)Azure Blob Storage
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Block Blobs
$0.0081
per GB/per month
Azure Data Lake Storage
$0.0081
per GB/per month
Files
$0.058
per GB/per month
Managed Discs
$1.54
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)Azure Blob Storage
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)Azure Blob Storage
Best Alternatives
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)Azure Blob Storage
Small Businesses
Vultr
Vultr
Score 6.9 out of 10
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
Score 9.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 10.0 out of 10
Google Cloud Storage
Google Cloud Storage
Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprises
Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 10.0 out of 10
Google Cloud Storage
Google Cloud Storage
Score 8.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)Azure Blob Storage
Likelihood to Recommend
9.1
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)Azure Blob Storage
Likelihood to Recommend
EBS is well-suited for use as a storage option for databases, including relational databases, NoSQL databases, and big data analytics databases. EBS can provide high IOPS (Input/Output Operations per Second) and low latency. EBS provides a high-availability storage solution, which ensures that your data is always available and accessible even in case of a single or multiple availability zone failures. EBS can also be replicated across multiple availability zones to ensure data durability. The scenario where I find it less appropriate is in terms of cost; EBS can be more expensive than other storage options, such as Amazon S3, especially for large amounts of data or for infrequently accessed data.
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Azure Blob Storage is well suited for cases where you are working with different data formats and looking for cost-effective storage solutions based on access frequency. Another area of strength is the encryption of data at rest, and encryption can be managed on your own. However, it may not be appropriate for transferring large data very fast.
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Pros
  • Raw storage capacity attached to your instance operative system
  • Frequent data rewriting (mission critical for reporting)
  • Low latency connectivity (14 reporting subsidiaries in different time zones)
  • Videly spreaded for implementation
  • Fast accessible drive
  • Block storage are core for Java, Net mobile applications
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  • Reduced cost. We were able to reduce our storage infrastructure by several hundred terabytes by consolidating redundant copies and dedupe/compression on files.
  • Extremely high level of redundancy. We can replicate data in a variety of ways that we would never have been capable of on our own hardware.
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Cons
  • EBS volume can be attached to only one EC2 instance at a time
  • The volumes are limited to the Availability zones of the instance they are attached to
  • The maximum size is 64TB. We have had usecases where we needed larger volume
  • The backup snapshots are stored on S3 and that's an additional cost.
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  • If we are transferring huge amount of data (outbound), it can get quite expensive.
  • With new features being added constantly, although a good thing, at times it becomes difficult to keep up with the changes. Documentation needs to keep UpToDate and should include best practices.
  • Performance can be improved especially when it comes to cold storage.
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Usability
Amazon EBS is a great tool and fairly easy to use as long as you are familiar with the Amazon Web Service ecosystem. It allows a great way for you to move storage around easily and allows you to quickly provision storage as needed based on the business requirement. For us, it's easy to move between our EC2 images that had been linked with EBS storage between these Amazon accounts.
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Blob storage is fairly simple, with several different options/settings that can be configured. The file explorer has enhanced its usability. Some areas could be improved, such as providing more details or stats on how many times a file has been accessed. It is an obvious choice if you're already using Azure/Entra.
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Support Rating
The support for Amazon Elastic Block Store is great as long as you can articulate your needs. Like most tools, there may be some back and forth before you find a support person that is knowledgable in the tool and can provide you with necessary insights.
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Documentation sometimes appears to be out of date or not fully documented properly with new releases. It is like documentation comes out for a specific version and is quickly out of date. Another issue is documentation is scarce on new releases and only seems to get properly updated (and sometimes is still wrong) once enough people hit the forums to complain.
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Alternatives Considered
Volumes range from cost-effective dollar-per-GB to high performance with the fastest IOPS and throughput. You can change volume types, tune performance, or increase volume size without disrupting your critical applications. EBS volumes are replicated within an Availability Zone (AZ) and can easily scale to petabytes of data. Build your SAN in the cloud for I/O-intensive applications. Run relational or NoSQL databases.
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Blob storage lets us control the file source/hosting and retain everything within our Microsoft ecosystem. Blob is less feature-rich than some of the other products. Still, we consider it as a value-added product included within our environment, and alternative products are not needed for our requirements. Keeping the hosting within our tenant locale is vital to us.
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Return on Investment
  • In terms of ROI, I found it's really cost-effective since maintenance cost is not there. No need to spend extra money on the procurement of hard drives
  • On demand feature of Ebs is quite effective when you require extra storage you can allocate and pay as per your need.
  • Accessibility from everywhere and deployment of it across different geographical location.
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  • Made it easy for organization to move to cloud from on-premise based solution.
  • We were able to centralize all our documents.
  • Cost savings compared to on-premise based solutions.
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