Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs. Microsoft Azure

Suitable for companies that are looking for performance at a competitive price, flexibility to switch instance type even with RI, flexibility to add-on IOPS, option to lower running cost with the regular introduction of new instance type that comes with higher performance but at a lower cost.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• A great variety of choices in Amazon Machine Image (AMI) types. Users can select a more basic type to run generic workloads, but also have the choice to pick an AMI pre-installed with specific services in the AWS Marketplace.
• The range of instance types can support the usage from a student's exploration (inexpensive general-purpose nano instances) to an enterprise's most intense workloads (memory or storage-optimized instances with terabytes of memory and ultra-fast network connection).
• The pricing options, from regular instances, reserved instances to spot instances allow users to get the job done and make smart choices about how much they want to pay and when they want to pay.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• This service is a bit difficult to consume. New users need a big learning curve to use this service effectively.
• UI for EC2 service is a little complex and at many places, it misses detailed explanation.
• Sometimes it takes too long to create images of EC2 instances. This keeps your EC2 up for that extra time. When instances are heavy, it penalizes a lot of money.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It's easy and straightforward for a technical person to use it via SSH, but when working in cross-functional teams, using Amazon's web console is difficult for this particular service. Most modern cloud providers provide a more seamless user interface to interact with their cloud machines, and the same should have been the case with EC2.

Incentivized

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"

Incentivized

It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators

Incentivized

AWS's support is good overall. Not outstanding, but better than average. We have had very little reason to engage with AWS support but in our limited experience, the staff has been knowledgeable, timely and helpful. The only negative is actually initiating a service request can be a bit of a pain.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Azure VM Builder offers good service, but the options are quite limited (Too much inclined to Windows as it is prepared by Microsoft). EC2 image building capabilities are the best in the market, and offer Windows, Linux (CentOS, rh2, debian, ubuntu), along with other distros, which helps customers choose according to their needs.

Incentivized

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.

• With EC2 you pay only when is Running, so you can save up to 75% on Dev environments which are running only on office hours
• You have several ways to pay for EC2, with EC2 Reserved Instances you pay with a discount of up to 72% if you make a commitment of using them from 1 or 3 years
• With EC2 spot you can use spare AWS EC2 capacity with a discount of up to 90%, your workload must be interrupt tolerant as your EC2 could be reclaim by AWS and the EC2 terminated

Incentivized

• 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.