Cloud service review: AWS vs. Microsoft Azure

Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are the leading cloud services on the market. Each offers inherent benefits and some weaknesses, so how do you choose between the two? It’s an important decision with long-term ramifications tied to potential vendor lock-in.

To help you make the best decision, IT Central Station collected feedback  from enterprise technology professionals who have hands-on experience using these cloud platforms. (Insider Pro subscribers can download the PDF report that compares the two products in detail.)

When comparing AWS to Azure, users not only identified the most valuable features, but also noted the strengths and areas of improvement for both AWS and Azure as outlined in the tables below:

Why AWS users chose it over Azure

Why Azure users chose it over AWS

Users comment on Amazon Web Services pros and cons

 Pro: “For our customers, it (AWS) optimizes their TCO. In terms of computing, they can scale up and out.” Ahmed Poshi, Solution Specialist

 Pro: “With the pay-as-you-go model, we don't have to predict future IT needs. We can just scale up as we want. That helps with a lot of agility in deploying stuff in our IT infrastructure.” Ajay Mendez

 Pro: “I fell in love with AWS right away: their services, quality and quantity of documentation.” Romain Ecarnot, Solutions Architect at a company with 10,001+ employees

Con: “The rate of new services and features released by AWS has dramatically accelerated. AWS should provide even more support and engagement to accelerate adoption.” Ram Ramdas

Con:“There's no interaction between the applications and that makes it tedious. We have to do the preparation all over again for each of our other applications.”  Carlo Lainer, Senior Information Security Specialist

Users comment on Microsoft Azure pros and cons

 Pro: “It has helped in reducing the time involved for coding using R and/or Python.” Nitin-Jain, Senior Associate - Data Science

 Pro: “Being able to set up, change, and configure VMs is easy - a lot easier than in AWS. Feedback and error messages make much more sense in Azure than in AWS.” Michelle Sollicito, Software Architect at a security firm

 Pro: “Azure is a platform which allows our organization to be agile. It very quickly provisions servers, infrastructure, and apps on the fly and complies with security requirements and data safety.” Edgar Parra, Technical Delivery Manager

Download the PDF report to see how enterprise technology professionals compared these two industry leaders.