Kamal Singh Yadav Virtualization and Cloud Computing

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COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN AMAZON AND MICROSOFT IN CLOUD COMPUTING

Cloud Computing is a type of computing that relies on shared computing resources

rather than having local servers or personal devices to handle applications. In its most
simple description, cloud computing is taking services (cloud services) and moving
them outside an organization’s firewall. Applications, storage and other services are
accessed via the web. The services are delivered and used over the internet and are
paid for by the cloud customer on an as-needed or pay-per-use business model.

While the term “cloud computing” was popularized with Amazon.com releasing its
Elastic Compute Cloud product in 2006, references to the phrase “cloud computing”
appeared as early as 1996. In August 2006, Amazon created subsidiary Amazon Web
Services and introduced its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), then Google released
Google App Engine in 2008 and in 2010, Microsoft released Microsoft Azure and
stepped into the market of cloud computing.

There are many players in the cloud computing market some of the competitor’s
being Amazon AWS (41.9%), Microsoft Azure (29.4%), Google Cloud Platform (3.0%),
IBM Softlayer (2.6%), Rackspace (2.9%) and other (20.7%). Amazon AWS and Microsoft
Azure being the two biggest player in the market and let’s compare them.

Microsoft Azure offers Virtual Network (VNET) that offers user ability to create isolated
networks as well as subnets, route tables, private IP address ranges and networks
gateways. Both companies offers solutions to extend the on-premise data centre into
the cloud and firewall option. Microsoft’s pricing is also pay-as-you-go, but they
charge per minute, which provides a more exact pricing model. Azure also offers short
term commitments with the option between pre-paid or monthly charges. Users are
billed a flat monthly rate. Microsoft hasn’t always embraced the model, but Azure is
catching up-organizations now can run Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Apache Hadoop
clusters in Azure. If you’re a window admin, Azure will be easier to use out of the box
because it is a Windows platform and doesn’t require learning something new.
Amazon AWS offers Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) so users can create isolated networks
within the cloud. Within a VPC, a user can create subnets, route tables, private IP
address ranges, and network gateways. Amazon has a pay-as-you-go model, where
they charge per hour. Pricing is based on a sliding scale tied to monthly usage, so your
bill could potentially be quite high if you’re a heavy user. Amazon has had a better
relationship with the open source community, so there are more open source
integrations available in this platform, including Jenkins and Github. It’s also friendlier
to Linux servers. Amazon offers more features and configurations– if you’re willing to
learn the system. IT pros agree that AWS offers a lot of power, flexibility, and
customization room with support for many third-party integrations. But there is a
learning curve with AWS.
AWS and Azure offer many similar capabilities, so it’s not necessarily a matter of one
provider being “better” or “worse” than the other and neither do having larger market
share mean that AWS is better it simply shows that AWS has larger penetration in the
cloud market and as the performance of the Azure shows that it will soon catch-up to
AWS and currently is earning more than AWS.