Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure both offer a broad and profound set of services with global outreach. Many organizations choose to leverage both platforms together for a wide range of choices, flexibility, as well as, to mitigate the risk and dependencies with a “multi-cloud” approach. Despite everything, the Azure vs AWS cloud war continues to be at its peak.

Calculate, process, and compute—a computer’s fundamental role. In addition, the right cloud provider with the right service can scale up to thousands of processing nodes for you in just a few minutes.

If you need much faster processing for graphics, data analysis or any other high-performance application, you can either buy more hardware or simply migrate to cloud.

Now, if you buy the hardware, no doubt you own it as an asset. But, don’t forget that you are also paying for the idle time when the computers are not doing any actual processing and also the maintenance that comes with it which can be really high if you want to scale.

On the other hand, when you opt for cloud, you just pay for what you use and can scale up or down to thousands of processing nodes as per your needs.

“Compute” is a very holistic term and when we get into the details there are a plethora of branches depending on the different requirements. Hence, computing becomes the key pillar for a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) to get a worldwide customer base.

AWS vs Azure: Compute Services Comparison

The exponential growth of cloud adoption has made cloud providers bring in as many services as they can. You may want to have a clear view of the services being offered and their alternatives offered by different cloud providers. Amazon Web Services and Azure, both being the market leaders have a solid catalog when it comes to compute services.

S. No. Services AWS Azure 1 Virtual Server Amazon EC2 Azure Virtual Machine 2 Bare Metal Server Amazon EC2 Bare Metal Instance (Preview) Azure Bare Metal Servers (Large Instance Only for SAP Hana) 3 Virtual Dedicated Host Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host – 4 Shared Web Hosting – Azure Shared App Services 5 Container Registration Service Amazon EC2 Container Registry Azure Container Registry 6 Container Management Service Amazon EC2 Container Service Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Azure Container Instances 7 Micro Services App Development Platform AWS Lambda Azure Service Fabric Azure Functions Event Grid 8 Virtual Private Servers Amazon Lightsail Azure App Service Environment 9 Auto Scaling Auto Scaling Azure Autoscale Virtual Machine Scale Sets 10 Batch Jobs AWS Batch Azure Batch 11 App Development/ Deployment (Java/.Net/PHP/Python) AWS Elastic Beanstalk Azure Web Apps Azure Cloud Services 12 Event Driven Computing AWS Lambda Azure Functions Event Grid

In Conclusion:

The fundamental idea of providing so many compute services (or different type of virtual computers) is that customer can use a specific service to meet the requirements.

To select the service, you need to layout your actual requirements referring to the compute power for required operations. Amazon has the most popular compute service i.e. Amazon EC2 while on the other hand, Azure provides Virtual Machine.

Here, Amazon slightly gets ahead in the race for offering better compute services. But nowadays, most of the customers pick and choose services from both the cloud players which seems a more suitable option. It also helps you to avoid vendor lock-in.

Above all, the Azure vs AWS battle doesn’t stop at compute services. They have an extensive set of services to combat upon. Download the ultimate cheat sheet of AWS & Azure comparison.