AWS VS. AZURECLOUD WARS

PAUL OLIVERPRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ARCHITECT

@ItsPaultasticVOSAIC

BOUNCING CATSBEATBOX PHRASE #1

PAUL OLIVER

MY EXPERIENCE WITH AZURE AND AWS

▸ 14+ months Azure (idea5)

▸ VMs, Cloud Services, SQL Azure, Redis, Blob Storage, Queues, Site-to-site VPN, Azure Websites, Azure Search

▸ 9+ months AWS (Vosaic)

▸ EC2, S3, SES, SNS, DynamoDB, Route53, API Gateway, Elastic Transcoder, Elastic Beanstalk, IAM, CloudFront, CloudFormation, CloudWatch

WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT TO YOU IN A CLOUD PROVIDER?

QUESTION:

HOW WILL YOU COMPARE AZURE & AWS?

HOW WILL YOU COMPARE AZURE AND AWS?

▸ Compute Instances

▸ Storage

▸ Databases

▸ Deployment

▸ Security

▸ User Interface

▸ Support and Community

▸ Price

▸ Troubleshooting & Metrics

▸ Uptime

COMPUTE INSTANCESROUND 1

VIRTUAL MACHINES EC2

COMPUTE INSTANCES

AWS Azure

Instance Types 54 52

Image Choices 67,137 2,843

OS’s supported 11 9

Max CPUs 40 32

Max Memory 244 GB 448 GB

VM CHOICES

COMPUTE INSTANCES

WINNER: TIE

▸ You probably don’t need 65,000+ images

▸ You probably don’t need 448 GB of RAM

▸ Azure and AWS both provide incredible power in their compute category

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STORAGEROUND 2

BLOB STORAGE S3

STORAGE

AWS Azure

REST API Yes YesBatch Import Yes Yes

Auto Delete/Archive Yes No

Requester Pay Yes No

Encrypt Data Server Side Yes In Progress

Reduced Redundancy File Level Storage Account Level

Max Size of Blob 5 TB 1 TB

Security Granularity File-level Bucket Level

S3 LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT

STORAGE

WINNER: AWS (S3)

▸ Having file-level granularity for security is VERY useful

▸ Auto-archive (move to infrequent access after X days) can save you a lot of money

▸ Auto-delete after X days huge money saver and management saver

▸ Requester pay for storage also nice for enabling SaaS apps

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DATABASESROUND 3

SQL AZURE, AZURE DATA WAREHOUSE, DOCUMENTDB

RDS, REDSHIFT, DYNAMODB

DATABASES

AWS Azure

Relational DB Engines as a Service 6 2

NOSQL Engines 2 2

Use SSMS Yes Yes

Ease of managing SQL Server as a service Moderate EASY!

Ease of backup Moderate EASY!

Data Warehouse as a Service Yes Yes

DBEngines as a service: (AWS) Oracle, Postgres, MySQL, AuroraDB, MariaDB, SQL Server. (Azure) SQL Server, mySQL

AWS RDS

DATABASES

WINNER: AWS…BARELY

▸ If you just want SQL Server in the cloud and you don’t want to manage it: Azure is the best

▸ If you need different database engines, like a bit more control, or you’d like a bit more mature NoSQL offering—AWS is better.

▸ Azure’s DocumentDB, on paper, is superior to Amazon’s DynamoDB. In practice, I like DynamoDB much better.

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DEPLOYMENTROUND 4

DEPLOYMENT

AWS Azure

Deploy using MSDeploy Yes Yes

Deploy using Powershell Yes Yes

Staging Slot for Hot Swap No Yes

Deploy to Autoscaling Group Yes Yes

Deploy from Visual Studio Yes Yes

Ease of Deployment Moderate EASY!

AZURE PRODUCTION/STAGE SLOT

DEPLOYMENT

WINNER: AZURE

▸ For deploying web applications—app services, cloud services and service fabric (for microservices) are OUTSTANDING

▸ Production and Staging slots for your app are game changers

▸ AWS allows you to accomplish these things but you have to create this manually

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PACKAGINGBEATBOX PHRASE #2

SECURITYROUND 5

RBAC, AZURE GOVERNMENT IAM, GOVCLOUD

SECURITY

AWS AzureIntegrate with on-prem

Active Directory Yes Yes

Control who can add/remove users Yes Yes

Control who can create/destroy edit resources Yes Yes

Fine-grained control over resource access Yes Sorta

Government-Friendly Cloud Region Yes Yes

Azure recently released RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) which is like a subset of IAM in AWS.

AWS IAM

SECURITY

WINNER: AWS

▸ AWS’s IAM is a must-have tool for risk management

▸ Azure’s newly-released RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) is following in the footsteps of IAM and shows promise

▸ AWS GovCloud is the standard if you are trying to work with government agencies. Azure Government is trying to build the reputation.

▸ Azure provides a hybrid Active Directory experience, which could appeal to your IT Department

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USER INTERFACEROUND 6

AZURE PORTAL, CLI AWS CONSOLE, CLI

USER INTERFACE

AWS Azure

Web-Based Tool Yes Yes

CLI-Based Tool Yes Yes

Powershell Yes Yes

Python, Ruby SDK Yes Yes

Java, .NET SDK Yes Yes

AZURE PORTAL

USER INTERFACE

WINNER: AZURE (BARELY)

▸ Azure’s portal is slicker, more integrated than AWS’s console

▸ For both AWS & Azure—you can do a lot with the scripting SDKs (Powershell, Python, Ruby) for build and infrastructure automation

▸ Amazon’s SDKs for the scripting languages (Python, Ruby, etc.) are more mature, updated more frequently than Azure’s

76

SUPPORT & COMMUNITYROUND 7

SUPPORT & COMMUNITY

AWS Azure

Market Share of Cloud 31% 9%

Questions on Stack Overflow 30,374 33,378

US Conferences/Year 5 1ish

Webinars/Year ~180 ~100

Podcasts/Webcasts/Year ~38 ~100

Azure Friday

AWS CONFERENCES

SUPPORT & COMMUNITY

WINNER: AWS

▸ Amazon’s larger community and being the “cloud standard” give it the edge here

▸ Azure Fridays on Channel 9 are great!

▸ Amazon has more conferences and webinars, Azure focuses on podcasts and Channel 9 videos

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PRICEROUND 8

PRICE

AWS AzureMonth of VM (1 GB, 30 GB) $16.18 $17.85*

VMs billed by the Hour Minute

Cost to store 100 GB $3.00 $2.40

Small SQL Server DB $20.31** $4.98

Transcode 1 Hr. HD Video $1.80 $1.99

25 GB NOSQL DB, 3600 req/hour $0.04 $220.52

*month of vm: 1.33333 * 13.39 (because vm is .75 GB/20 GB)** Amazon RDS is its own dedicated database, 20 GB in size on a dedicated VM with 1 GB RAM. Azure SQL as a Service is shared resource

AWS SPOT INSTANCES

PRICE

WINNER: AWS (PROBABLY)

▸ In general, AWS on-demand compute costs are about 75% or less than Azure on-demand compute costs

▸ Azure is cheaper on storage and DB as a service for SQL Server

▸ Azure bills by the minute, AWS bills by the hour

▸ AWS: offers spot pricing and reserved instances which can save you a ton more.

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TROUBLESHOOTING & METRICS

ROUND 9

TROUBLESHOOTING & METRICS

AWS Azure

Custom Dashboard Yes Yes

Centralized Logging and Reports

Yes No

Error Reports Yes No

Notifications & Alerts Yes Yes

Track CPU Usage Yes Yes

Track Memory Usage Kinda Sometimes

AWS CLOUDWATCH LOGS

TROUBLESHOOTING & METRICS

WINNER: AWS (PROBABLY)

▸ AWS Cloudwatch is not as pretty as the new Azure Portal’s diagnostics

▸ AWS Cloudwatch provides centralized logging for lambda, API Gateway, CloudFormation, etc.

▸ Azure metrics are sort of spread out throughout your subscription

▸ Highly recommend a service like AzureWatch/NewRelic for Azure users

▸ AWS Cloudwatch isn’t enough for power users either

56

UPTIMEROUND 10

UPTIME

AWS Azure

SLA for Compute 99.95% 99.95%

SLA for Storage 99.9% 99.9%

2014 Downtime (hours) 2.41 39.77

2015 Downtime (hours) 2.50 10.82

Last 30 Days (minutes) 2.2 min 0 min

99.95% = ~4.5 hours/year99.9% = ~9 hours/year

AZURE STATUS

UPTIME

WINNER: AWS

▸ AWS downtime happens, but it doesn’t typically last long

▸ Azure downtime before 2016: happens fairly often

▸ Azure downtime after Jan 1, 2016: very rare (so far)

▸ November 18, 2014: Azure multi-region outage, lasted 6-10 hours depending on your region

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BORN TO BE TOO PUFFY TO BEAT A BABOON TO POVERTY

BEATBOX PHRASE #3

AND THE WINNER IS…CONCLUSION

AND THE WINNER IS…

COMPUTE

STORAGE

DATABASES

DEPLOYMENT

SECURITY

INTERFACE

SUPPORT & COMMUNITY

PRICE

TROUBLESHOOTING

UPTIME

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Azure: 7

Azure: 5

Azure: 7

Azure: 7

Azure: 7

Azure: 7

Azure: 9

Azure: 7

Azure: 6

Azure: 8

AWS: 9

AWS: 6

AWS: 8

AWS: 8

AWS: 6

AWS: 9

AWS: 7

AWS: 8

AWS: 9

AWS: 8

AND THE WINNER IS…

WINNER: AWS

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IT DEPENDS ON YOUR SITUATION

Micro$oft

‣ You value broader offering with a longer track record

‣ Want to use whatever Netflix, Pinterest, Airbnb, Slack, Foursquare, and Spotify are using

‣ Want to deploy dozens and dozens of VMs and have fine-grained control over them

‣ Really want to “wheel and deal” on VM prices with spot instances and reserved instances

‣ Need to store thousands of files in blob storage and want fine-grained control over their lifecycle

‣ Most developers in your shop have MSDN subscriptions

‣ Your shop uses Visual Studio Team Services

‣ You would like to leverage Active Directory for a Single-Sign On for all users in your organization for just about any third party app

‣ You want to set up a hybrid network between your on-premise domain and your cloud domain

‣ You only need SQL Server or mySQL and would prefer to run it as a PaaS

PAUL OLIVERPRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ARCHITECT

@ItsPaultasticVOSAIC

https://tinyurl.com/awsazurevideo