AWS vs. Azure—Comparing the two cloud providers

AWS and Azure are top players in the global cloud market, delivering high performance, speed, reliability, and scalability. While both offer worldwide coverage and a fairly similar range of services, AWS and Azure differ in certain aspects, including market share, pricing, and computing power.

In this AWS vs. Azure comparison, we’ll break down their flagship features and highlight the most notable differences to help you choose the cloud provider that fits your needs to a T. We’ll also present Miro—a versatile Innovation Workspace that makes it easy to visualize every part of your cloud infrastructure, no matter which provider you end up with.

What is AWS?

Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s leading cloud provider, widely known for its: 

• Comprehensive range of services and functionalities

• Millions of users worldwide

• Extensive global network

Since it’s been around for almost two decades, AWS offers maturity, expertise, and reliability. Many people see it as the industry’s most significant innovator, as AWS strives to offer the latest technologies to its users. For example, back in 2014, AWS pioneered the serverless computing space with its AWS Lambda service.

What are the benefits of AWS?

Here are some of the biggest benefits of AWS:

Diverse set of solutions

No matter what your cloud computing needs are, AWS has you covered. The platform offers over 200 fully managed and self-managed services not just for cloud computing and storage but also for managing relational databases, networking, data analysis, and much more.

Global infrastructure

AWS has an impressive Global Infrastructure—an extensive network of mutually connected data centers strategically deployed all around the world. The network has two key components: Regions: Regions are separate geographical areas that contain data centers. The AWS Global Infrastructure currently has 36 Regions. Availability Zones (AZs): AZs represent grouped data centers within separate Regions. Each Region entails multiple AZs—currently, the Global Infrastructure has 114 AZs.

Besides Regions and AZs, the AWS Global Infrastructure has other components, like Edge Locations and Wavelength Zones. All these elements work in perfect sync to:

• Provide better security for your resources through constant monitoring and encryption

• Minimize downtime (for example, if one AZ fails, the rest of the infrastructure will keep running)

• Offer high performance for your infrastructure by allowing you to deploy your workloads close to your users

Scalability

If your app or website faces fluctuating demand, you need an infrastructure that can handle peak times while maintaining performance. Traditionally, this would translate to hefty investments in resources just to be able to “survive” high-demand periods. Luckily, this isn’t an issue with AWS.

Scalability in AWS means that your resources can automatically scale up and down to align with the demand. For example, if you run an online swimwear store and summer is just around the corner, you’ll see a spike in traffic. Your AWS resources will scale up to meet the increased demand. Once summer winds down and traffic slows, your resources will scale down to preserve operational efficiency and save you money.

What is Azure?

Azure is a cloud computing platform developed by Microsoft. Like AWS, Azure features over 200 products and services, allowing users to easily find whatever cloud solution they need. With an extensive global network, Azure caters to users worldwide. 

Since it’s developed by Microsoft, it’s no surprise that one of Azure’s key advantages is the seamless integration with other Microsoft products, including Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365. So, if you’re already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem, choosing Azure might be a no-brainer. You’ll get access to state-of-the-art cloud computing solutions, including excellent security options, AI capabilities, and scalability. 

What are the benefits of Azure?

Azure offers many benefits, including:

Large global footprint

Azure has an impressive global footprint with 60+ regions worldwide and over 300 highly secure data centers within them.

This means that you can:

• Deploy your apps close to end users to guarantee minimum delay

• Deliver ultra-fast and responsive experiences to virtually any location on the planet

• Meet relevant compliance standards for storing sensitive information (like patient records or medical histories) in a specific location

Enterprise expertise

While Azure caters to businesses of all sizes, it truly shines when it comes to enterprise-level support. It excels in handling mission-critical workloads, making it a top choice for large companies. In fact, many Fortune 500 companies, such as SAP and Databricks, rely on Azure for their cloud computing needs.

Robust analytics and business intelligence

Azure helps businesses thrive by offering robust analytics and business intelligence capabilities that provide detailed insights into operations and overall efficiency.

Take Azure Synapse Analytics, for example. The tool lets you combine insights from data warehouses and big data analytics systems to keep data in one place and analyze it in real time.

Microsoft Azure vs. AWS—Key differences

At first glance, AWS and Azure may look the same—you may even think they have the same features, just backed by different technology giants. 

While there are many overlaps, we’ll analyze the key differences between the two cloud giants, from their market share to unique features and capabilities, to help you choose the most suitable option for your cloud workloads.

Market share

According to the data from Statista, AWS is the clear winner when it comes to market share. In the fourth quarter of 2024, AWS dominated the cloud infrastructure service market, holding 33% of market share. Such findings may not be surprising. After all, AWS has been on the market the longest, and millions of users choose the platform because of its long-standing reliability, consistency, and passion for innovation.

Azure is the second best, with a market share of 20%. While that’s not as high as AWS, it reflects Azure’s strong footprint in the cloud market space. Azure is especially popular among specific user groups, like enterprises or those already using Microsoft products.

Computing power

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is AWS’ flagship computing service, while its direct counterpart is Azure Virtual Machines (VMs). Both offer scalability, ultra-fast performance, and versatility in terms of instance types. 

This versatility means you can find an instance for any type of workload. For example, if you have a specialized app that relies on a huge database, you’ll need a “special” instance that can handle high input/output (I/O) volume, as your app will have to read and write a lot of data.

While both AWS and Azure offer impressive computing options, AWS EC2 takes the cake here because:

• It offers over 750 instances to suit all kinds of workloads.

• It’s more customizable, allowing you to choose the storage, operating system, networking, and processor according to your needs.

• It provides on-demand Mac instances (Azure doesn’t).

• It offers 400 Gbps Ethernet networking, which is perfect for handling large amounts of data and minimizing delays.

Hybrid cloud solutions

A hybrid cloud brings together your on-premises data center and a “classic” cloud into a single streamlined infrastructure for easier data transfer, more flexibility, and compliance with different regulatory requirements.

Both AWS and Azure offer hybrid cloud support, but not to the same extent. When it comes to AWS, its hybrid offering revolves around:

1. AWS Outposts: The service lets you run AWS infrastructure on-premises and enjoy a fantastic hybrid experience. It is fully managed, meaning AWS takes care of the entire infrastructure.

2. AWS Local Zones: They put AWS services closer to your end users to minimize delays.

While these are excellent services, it’s worth pointing out that AWS is primarily cloud-first oriented. Its cloud-native offerings are far more extensive than its hybrid cloud solutions.

Meanwhile, Azure is more focused on hybrid cloud solutions and offers options such as:

1. Azure Arc: It allows you to manage environments that extend across data centers, multiple clouds, and edge locations from one place. You can even handle resources hosted outside of Azure, including Windows and Linux servers, virtual machines, and Kubernetes clusters.

2. Azure Local: It lets you operate infrastructure across distributed locations enabled by Azure Arc.

3. Azure Monitor: It allows you to monitor your hybrid resources, visualize data, and troubleshoot issues.

Machine learning modeling options

Both AWS and Azure offer powerful AI and machine learning solutions. For example, both platforms feature machine learning studios where you can develop your own ML models—in AWS, that’s AWS SageMaker, and in Azure, that’s ML Studio.

The key difference between the two services is that AWS SageMaker is more code-centric. While there are some low-code or no-code options that can help those without a programming background (like the SageMaker AI console), you can fully leverage AWS SageMaker only if you have coding experience. Knowledge of Python and Jupyter Notebook will certainly come in handy when you’re working with AWS SageMaker.

On the other hand, Azure ML Studio focuses on offering a codeless experience to its users. You build models by dragging and dropping pieces meaning you don’t need expert-level knowledge for model deployment.

While SageMaker may require coding knowledge, it offers better customization options for model training, so this may be an essential factor to consider.

AWS vs. Azure—Which is better?

AWS and Azure are both capable, reliable, and secure cloud providers. Ultimately, choosing between them will come down to your specific needs and preferences, but here are some general “rules” that may help you decide.

Choose AWS if:

• You want peace of mind knowing you’ve opted for a market leader and cloud computing pioneer

• You need extensive customization options

• You have complex infrastructure needs and want high performance and zero delays

Choose Azure if:

• You want a seamless integration with the Microsoft ecosystem

• You want robust hybrid cloud capabilities

• You need extensive enterprise support

AWS customer stories

The best way to understand what you can achieve with AWS is to check out its customer stories. Here are two:

Mortgage Advice Bureau

Mortgage Advice Bureau (MAB) is a UK-based mortgage intermediary that processes around 12,000 mortgages and receives about 400 complaints per year. It wanted to build an AI-based solution that would help them resolve complaints faster, before they escalate to the Financial Ombudsman (the last resort for disputes).

MAB used various AWS services and worked with BJSS (one of AWS’ partners) to achieve their goal, and the results were amazing—the complaint handling time was reduced from up to four days to only 10 minutes.

Venmo

Venmo, a popular mobile payment service, has grown to over 90 million active accounts since its launch in 2012. Due to the rapid growth, the company decided it needed to reevaluate and modernize its architecture to ensure high performance and make room for expansion.

Venmo’s legacy data storage solution became too expensive, so the company opted to migrate a critical database to Amazon DynamoDB, a serverless NoSQL database. The migration was carried out in steps, so there was no downtime.

The results? Venmo managed to reduce infrastructure costs by 90%.

Azure customer stories

Here are a few inspiring stories from customers who relied on Azure to effortlessly reach their goals:

CareStack

CareStack is a company that managed to develop an all-in-one dental practice management solution with Azure’s support. 

It all started when CareStack realized the need for a unified app that would let dental clinics centralize practice management and provide patients with the best experience possible. Without such a solution, many dental clinics struggled with:

• Operational efficiency

• Patient satisfaction

• Business growth

CareStack wanted to help customers overcome these challenges and chose to develop a cloud solution with Azure’s help.

The first version of the product took only 12 months to develop and offered numerous advantages, including:

1. Enhanced scalability at lower costs: CareStack is an auto-scalable solution that caters to dental clinics of all sizes. The pay-as-you-go model ensures customers pay only for what they use, so there’s no money wasted.

2. HIPPA compliance: Azure allows CareStack to comply with HIPPA’s strict physical, technical, and administrative data security standards.

3. Centralization: Instead of using multiple platforms and paying for each, CareStake’s customers can now manage their practice from a single location, which improves operational efficiency and optimizes costs.

Godrej Consumer Products

Godrej Consumer Products is a leading consumer goods company from India. The enterprise has been expanding rapidly and, at one point, decided to explore the benefits of cloud computing. It opted for Microsoft Azure and began moving its on-premises SAP platform to the cloud.

The migration was executed in four phases and allowed the company to achieve the following results:

1. An availability rate of 99.9%, so customers can enjoy uninterrupted service

2. Improved app response times, which automatically lead to better customer experience

3. More time for the IT team to focus on critical tasks

Understand every part of your cloud architecture with Miro

AWS and Azure are industry-leading cloud providers with hundreds of options for building a system tailored to your needs. However, designing a system with any cloud provider can easily get chaotic if you don’t fully understand its components and their interactions. Without a clear overview of your cloud architecture, you’ll be looking at bottlenecks, cost inefficiency, and strained collaboration across teams.

There’s a simple solution that can give you an in-depth overview of your entire cloud architecture—a diagramming tool like Miro.

Miro’s an AI-powered Innovation Workspace that lets you create diagrams of Azure and AWS cloud architectures of all sizes and complexities, all from an infinite canvas. Here are some of our powerful cloud diagramming options:

• Shape packs: Miro makes diagramming effortless with our vast library of standardized cloud architecture icons for both AWS and Azure. You can drag and drop them across your Miro board until you design the architecture you want.

• Diagram focus mode: Miro helps you unleash your full diagramming potential with tools like a curated toolbar, layers, and the ability to adjust alignment and distribution with ease.

• 26+ cloud architecture diagramming templates: Skip the hassle of creating AWS and Azure diagrams from scratch by relying on some of our ready-made templates. We recommend the AWS Architecture Diagramming Template and the Azure Architecture Diagramming Template.

• Real-time and async collaboration options: Miro makes it easy to collaborate with your team on refining your cloud diagram. You can use workshops and interactive presentations to stay connected in real time or record a Talktrack directly from your Miro board if you prefer async collaboration.

If you choose AWS, you’ll get some extra features thanks to our partnership with this cloud provider, including:

1. AWS Cloud View app: Import data from your AWS account into Miro to automatically generate diagrams. 

2. AWS Cost Calculator: Effortlessly estimate costs for the chosen AWS services and review prices side-by-side to optimize expenses.

Optimize your AWS and Azure cloud architecture with Miro

Ready to gain detailed insight into your cloud architecture? Sign up for the free Business trial and explore Miro’s AWS and Azure capabilities. 

Want to see Miro in action? Check out the results that ClickHouse, a database management company, was able to achieve with our AWS solutions.