Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) vs. Azure Data Lake Storage

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon S3
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Amazon S3 is a cloud-based object storage service from Amazon Web Services. It's key features are storage management and monitoring, access management and security, data querying, and data transfer.N/A
Azure Data Lake Storage
Score 9.6 out of 10
N/A
Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 is a highly scalable and cost-effective data lake solution for big data analytics. It combines the power of a high-performance file system with massive scale and economy to help you speed your time to insight. Data Lake Storage Gen2 extends Azure Blob Storage capabilities and is optimized for analytics workloads.N/A
Pricing
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Azure Data Lake Storage
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon S3Azure Data Lake Storage
Free Trial
NoNo
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 S3 (Simple Storage Service)Azure Data Lake Storage
Features
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Azure Data Lake Storage
Data Center Backup
Comparison of Data Center Backup features of Product A and Product B
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
9.0
Ratings
8% above category average
Azure Data Lake Storage
-
Ratings
Universal recovery9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Instant recovery7.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Recovery verification8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Business application protection8.60 Ratings00 Ratings
Multiple backup destinations9.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Incremental backup identification9.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Backup to the cloud9.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Deduplication and file compression8.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Snapshots9.50 Ratings00 Ratings
Flexible deployment9.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Management dashboard8.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform support8.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Retention options10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Encryption9.80 Ratings00 Ratings
Enterprise Backup
Comparison of Enterprise Backup features of Product A and Product B
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
8.8
Ratings
7% above category average
Azure Data Lake Storage
-
Ratings
Continuous data protection9.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Replication9.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Operational reporting and analytics8.50 Ratings00 Ratings
Malware protection8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Multi-location capabilities9.50 Ratings00 Ratings
Ransomware Recovery8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Azure Data Lake Storage
Small Businesses
Cove Data Protection
Cove Data Protection
Score 9.9 out of 10
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
Score 9.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Bacula Enterprise
Bacula Enterprise
Score 9.2 out of 10
Azure Blob Storage
Azure Blob Storage
Score 9.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Bacula Enterprise
Bacula Enterprise
Score 9.2 out of 10
Azure Blob Storage
Azure Blob Storage
Score 9.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Azure Data Lake Storage
Likelihood to Recommend
9.2
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.6
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.8
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Azure Data Lake Storage
Likelihood to Recommend
For archiving old data that is infrequently accessed it is perfect. You can choose to let it go into cold/glacier storage which saves even further costs but at the expense of accessibility. I like that you can set access rules to automatically move it to the next storage tier after a certain amount of time that it has not been accessed. I also use it a lot with PHP via the API. We have some custom in-house applications that have a fair amount of data uploaded into them. S3 has been a perfect solution to store these files, taking the load off web servers and never having issues with running out of storage.
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Azure Data Lake storage is well suited for applications/use cases within organizations where capturing and storing large amounts of data in any format is required, primarily for storing and processing purposes. It's an easy and cost-effective cloud solution for your application data. The ability to integrate with other Azure Services like Azure Databricks and Azure Data Factory is superb.
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Pros
  • Reliable and secure way to store objects in cloud: Storing any type of file(text, pdf, doc, csv, etc) is very easy with S3. Fetching this stored content as and when you require is also pretty easy and can be done using both the console and AWS CLI. Appropriate permissions can be set up for buckets using IAM roles/policies.
  • Versioning in buckets: S3 gives you a very handy feature to store multiple versions of objects stored in a bucket.
  • Lifecycle policies: You can set up lifecycle policies in S3 that can move your older objects to IA or Glacier. This setup is very easy and can be done within minutes for a bucket.
  • Replication: The cross-region replication that S3 provides is wonderful. Beware of the inter-regional data transfer costs though.
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  • Azure Data Lake Storage is extremely scalable. It allows us to scale up or down endlessly based on what we need including replication.
  • In terms of security, Azure Data Lake Storage fits our requirements really well as we can monitor and encrypt seamlessly. We can also assign permissions through roles and grant network-level access.
  • Due to the fact that it can scale, we are able to monitor the cost of storage and any given time and make financial decisions about our infrastructure based on how small or big we want to scale.
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Cons
  • The biggest problem is to rename the bucket. There is no direct way to do it. One need to copy entire content to the different bucket with intended bucket name and then remove the old bucket. Sometimes it creates issues.
  • There is no direct way to upload .zip file and extract it to inside the bucket.
  • While uploading large files, sometimes you will find a drop of upload speed. I observe it so many times and while checking my internet speed, I find it absolutely perfect. So there must have something wrong on the AWS side.
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  • I'd like to see a better cross-platform native client. Azure Data Explorer is fine, but it's far from the "SSMS" kind of experience SQL Server users are used to.
  • Listing a large number of file is somewhat problematic and slow. Using the native C# library, running directly on an Azure VM, it can take several hours to list just a couple million files.
  • Switching from V1 to V2 requires the creation of a new Storage Account and that's pretty inconvenient.
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Likelihood to Renew
Due to princing, availability and scalability.
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No answers on this topic
Usability
The UI could have some improvements (better filters) and there is a lack of some useful functionality, such as renaming an existing bucket: the latter is much needed in the context of rapidly evolving companies. Overall though, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is easy to use and to onboard people and tools to, thanks to its various APIs and flexibility.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
It depends on your tier within Amazon on how great of support you get. For us we have a dedicated Point of Contact that is great in taking in what we need and discussing it with the S3 team. The best thing is features we need or suggest have a good chance of landing on their roadmap.
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Alternatives Considered
S3 is the most mature simple storage service on the web. It has direct competitors from Google and Azure, as well as a bunch of other competitors that focus on different aspects. For example, Backblaze specializes on file backups, and while s3 can also be used for that, Backblaze provides a better price point in exchange for more focused functionality. S3 really shines in that it performs simple things astonishingly well, while also being flexible enough to stretch itself to other situations (data lakes, file mounts, backup/restores systems, web hosting, etc.).
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The Azure Data Lake solution is designed for organizations that want to take advantage of big data. It provides a data platform that can help developers, data scientists, and analysts store data of any size and format and perform all types of processing and analytics across multiple platforms and programming languages. It can work with your existing solutions, such as identity management and security solutions. It also integrates with other data warehouses and cloud environments. It can be useful for organizations that need the above softwares.
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Return on Investment
  • Allows us to store large amounts of raw traffic from data providers to allow us to view data our systems received at particular times, in order to reconstruct inputs in case of errors
  • Is capable of storing very large amounts of data cheaply without material impact to our business
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  • The cost can be high for more advanced work. In some cases, for instance, time limits and lab runtimes may be too short if you are too slow to learn what is explained as you go along.
  • promote flexible team communication. You can create different spaces for different teams, and share files and tasks.
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ScreenShots