The two entities that dominate the enterprise Cloud Computing landscape are undoubtedly Microsoft Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services. Though Google App Engine is maturing rapidly, I am not planning to cover it in this series. I may compare Windows Azure and Google App Engine in a separate article.
With the latest announcements from PDC, Microsoft is inching closer to Amazon Web Services to match the offerings. Windows Azure is also blurring the line between PaaS and IaaS by offering VM Role that enables businesses to bring their legacy applications to the Cloud. Microsoft is leveraging the leadership in the platform and tools by seamlessly integrating the Cloud with .NET and Visual Studio.
Amazon is a very credible player in the Cloud Computing space and enjoys the leadership position in the IaaS offerings. Their fast paced innovations ensure that they have a lead and help them differentiate from the competition. They have a very healthy ecosystem of partners and developers who build rich and complimentary tools on AWS.
This series of articles attempts at comparing the Windows Azure Platform and Amazon Web Services. The objectives of this series are the following –
- Provide objective comparison between the two
- Enable enterprises and ISVs to take an informed decision
- Avoid marketing speak and buzz words
- Be neutral and unbiased in the approach
The following table provides a quick comparison of both the platforms.
Microsoft Windows Azure Platform and Amazon Web Services
Looking at the above, it is evident that these two stacks will go head-on to secure the mind share and market share. While Microsoft is moving some of the middleware components from BizTalk Server to Azure, Amazon is leveraging it’s payment mechanism and components for AWS. Windows Azure will be the most comprehensive PaaS offering once all the above components are delivered.
In the next few articles, I will be providing a detailed study of Compute and Storage offerings from these two players. Expect to see the following technologies to be covered:
- Compute
- Storage
- Flexible Entities (Azure Tables / Amazon SimpleDB)
- Blobs (Azure Blobs / Amazon S3)
- Queues and Messages (Azure Queues / Amazon SQS)
- Persistent Block Storage (Azure Drive / Amazon EBS)
- Relational Database (SQL Azure / Amazon RDS)
The comparison study will cover the following factors –
- Terminology
- Size / Unit
- Limitations
- Pricing
- Security
- Language and Tools Support
Watch this space for the next part of the series where I will be covering Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud with Windows Azure Compute.
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