IN DEPTH AWS vs Azure
AWS vs Azure
What’s the difference? Not all cloud providers are the same. Steve Cassidy compares the two biggest platforms.
Image credit: Memedozaslan/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Cloud services have something to offer almost every kind of business. In fact, if you believe Amazon’s hype, we’re heading for a C world where companies of all sizes run entirely on remote servers. Microsoft treads a little more cautiously, focusing on hybrid architectures, but either way, it seems certain that the cloud is integral to the future of many businesses.
The challenge is, it’s not always easy to tell which cloud platform will be the best fit for a particular role in a particular organisation. That’s partly because the different providers make broadly the same promises, enabling you to deploy services almost on a whim, and scale them up or down with minimal management.
But while the fundamentals might seem identical, as soon as you start to look in depth at the two biggest platforms – those being, without question, Amazon and Microsoft – you run into nuances and differences of philosophy that can have an enormous impact on either the service or the customer.
How did we get here?
Only around 15 years ago, most corporations were built largely on in-house hardware. This was a big expense: the capital footprint of a standard server, including the lifetime costs, right down to the ground rent for the rack in which the server would hide, could easily come to £250,000. And after that investment, most server CPUs spent the majority of their time sitting idle.
Then came the virtualisation revolution, which allowed businesses to work their IT investments harder by running a dozen virtual servers on the same piece of iron. The response was undeniable – we don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that virtualisation was adopted more quickly than any other new technology in the history of computing. And it didn’t just work for on-premises hardware, because it was the perfect fit for cloud services, supporting the growing web and mobile app marketplaces.
» JETTING OFF OUT OF THE CLOUD
A new trend is appearing in 2023: leaving the cloud. After years of big corporations (that happen to run cloud infrastructure) proclaiming the cloud is the best thing since sliced bread, it turns out it’s not. Largely after years of investment and below-cost sales, companies that now feel they have a captive audience are starting to turn the screws.
According to CloudZero’s 2022 report, only 40% of the respondents estimated their “cloud costs are about where they should be or lower”, and in Anodot’s 2022 report, 50% of IT managers said that “it’s difficult to get cloud costs under control”.
One real-world example is HEY (https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-have-left-the-cloud251760fb), which explained that it took six months to migrate legacy services from the cloud. Even with the procurement of two pallets of Dell servers powering 4,000 vCPUs, it’ll save the company $1.5 million per year. The chief technology officer said, “I still think the cloud has a place for companies early enough in their lifecycle that the spend is either immaterial or the risk that they won’t be around in 24 months is high. Just be careful that you don’t look at those lavish cloud credits as a gift! It’s a hook.”
But costs aren’t the only reason to leave the cloud. IBM’s 2022 Transformation Index shows that 54% of respondents agree that “public cloud is not secure enough”. Concerns are driven by recurring vulnerabilities in cloud providers and the impact of cloud failures on the internet. Performance can also be an issue, but for more complex reasons, as cloud providers tend to provide better hardware than private owners, but local storage access advantages and lower local network latencies have unintended consequences.