This article helps you understand how Microsoft Azure services compare to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Whether you are planning a multicloud solution with Azure and AWS or migrating to Azure, you can compare the IT capabilities of Azure and AWS services in all categories.
This article compares services that are roughly comparable. Not every AWS service or Azure service is listed, and not every matched service has exact feature-for-feature parity.
Azure and AWS for multicloud solutions
As the leading public cloud platforms, Azure and AWS each offer a broad and deep set of capabilities with global coverage. Yet many organizations choose to use both platforms together for greater choice and flexibility, as well as to spread their risk and dependencies with a multicloud approach. Consulting companies and software vendors might also build on and use both Azure and AWS, as these platforms represent most of the cloud market demand.
Build and connect intelligent bots that interact with your users using text/SMS, Skype, Teams, Slack, Microsoft 365 mail, Twitter, and other popular services.
The Virtual Assistant Template brings together a number of best practices we've identified through the building of conversational experiences and automates integration of components that we've found to be highly beneficial to Bot Framework developers.
This architecture describes how to use a dedicated search service to dramatically increase the relevance of search results for your e-commerce customers.
Fully managed, low latency, and distributed big data analytics platform that runs complex queries across petabytes of data. Highly optimized for log and time series data.
Open and scalable end-to-end IoT analytics service. Collect, process, store, query, and visualize data at Internet of Things (IoT) scale--data that's highly contextualized and optimized for time series.
IoT telemetry analytics with Azure Data Explorer demonstrates near real-time analytics over a fast flowing, high volume, wide variety of streaming data from IoT devices.
This solution builds intelligent marketing systems that provide customer-tailored content by using machine learning models that analyze data from multiple sources.
Big data analytics with Azure Data Explorer demonstrates how Azure Data Explorer caters to volume, velocity, and variety of data, the three V's of big data.
Processes and moves data between different compute and storage services, as well as on-premises data sources at specified intervals. Create, schedule, orchestrate, and manage data pipelines.
Provides a serverless interactive query service that uses standard SQL for analyzing databases.
Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless or dedicated resources at scale.
Create a pipeline for ingesting and analyzing text, images, sentiment, and other data from RSS news feeds by using only Azure services, including Azure Cosmos DB and Azure AI services.
Virtual machines (VMs) and servers allow users to deploy, manage, and maintain OS and other software. Users pay for what they use, with the flexibility to change sizes.
AWS and Azure on-demand VMs bill per seconds used. Although AWS instance types and Azure VM sizes have similar categories, the exact RAM, CPU, and storage capabilities differ. For information about Azure VM sizes, see Azure VM sizes.
AWS and Azure solutions let you move VMware vSphere-based workloads and environments to the cloud. Azure VMware Solution is a VMware-verified Microsoft service that runs on Azure infrastructure. You can manage existing environments with VMware solution tools, while modernizing applications with cloud native services.
Autoscaling lets you automatically change the number of VM instances. You set defined metrics and thresholds that determine when to add or remove instances.
In Azure, virtual machine scale sets let you deploy and manage identical sets of VMs. The number of sets can autoscale. App Service autoscale lets you autoscale Azure App Service applications.
EKS and AKS let you orchestrate Docker containerized application deployments with Kubernetes. AKS simplifies monitoring and cluster management through auto upgrades and a built-in operations console. See Container runtime configuration for specifics on the hosting environment.
Azure Functions is the primary equivalent of AWS Lambda in providing serverless, on-demand code. AWS Lambda functionality also overlaps with Azure WebJobs, which let you schedule or continuously run background tasks.
This architecture can reduce the challenges of extract, transform, load (ETL) operations. You can use this architecture to generate business insights and then solve modeling and ETL tasks.
Learn how to improve cross-cloud scalability with a solution architecture that includes Azure Stack. A step-by-step flowchart details instructions for implementation.
Database offerings that automatically scales compute based on the workload demand. You're billed per second for the actual compute used (Azure SQL)/data that's processed by your queries (Azure Synapse Analytics Serverless).
Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database that natively supports multiple data models including key-value pairs, documents, graphs, and columnar.
An in-memory–based, distributed caching service that provides a high-performance store that's typically used to offload nontransactional work from a database.
Azure Cloud Shell is an interactive, authenticated, browser-accessible shell for managing Azure resources. It gives you the flexibility to choose the shell experience that best suits the way you work, either Bash or PowerShell.
This architecture is applicable to businesses that want to modernize end-to-end application development by using containers, continuous integration for build, and GitOps for continuous deployment.
Services that facilitate the mass ingestion of events (messages), typically from devices and sensors. The data can then be processed in real-time micro-batches or be written to storage for further analysis.
Services you can use to create digital representations of real-world things, places, business processes, and people. Use these services to gain insights, drive the creation of better products and new customer experiences, and optimize operations and costs.
Provides analysis of cloud resource configuration and security, so that subscribers can ensure they're making use of best practices and optimum configurations.
Microsoft Cost Management helps you understand your Azure invoice (bill), manage your billing account and subscriptions, monitor and control Azure spending, and optimize resource use.
The Activity log is a platform log in Azure that provides insight into subscription-level events, such as when a resource is modified or when a virtual machine is started.
A feature of Azure Monitor, Application Insights is an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service for developers and DevOps professionals, which provides telemetry insights and information, in order to better understand how applications are performing and to identify areas for optimization.
A Resource Group is a container that holds related resources for an Azure solution. Apply tags to your Azure resources to logically organize them by categories.
Manage and interact with Azure services the way you prefer, programmatically from your language of choice, by using the Azure SDKs, our collection of tools, or both.
A fully managed, real-time data ingestion service. Stream millions of events per second, from any source, to build dynamic data pipelines and to immediately respond to business challenges.
Service Bus Premium is fully compliant with the Java/Jakarta EE Java Message Service (JMS) 2.0 API. Service Bus Standard supports the JMS 1.1 subset focused on queues.
A recommended architecture for implementing an enterprise integration pattern with Azure Logic Apps, Azure API Management, Azure Service Bus, and Azure Event Grid.
Provides an isolated, private environment in the cloud. Users have control over their virtual networking environment, including selection of their own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways.
A service that simplifies outbound-only Internet connectivity for virtual networks. When configured on a subnet, all outbound connectivity uses your specified static public IP addresses. Outbound connectivity is possible without a load balancer or public IP addresses directly attached to virtual machines.
Connects Azure virtual networks to other Azure virtual networks, or customer on-premises networks (Site To Site). Allows end users to connect to Azure services through VPN tunneling (Point To Site).
A service that hosts domain names, plus routes users to Internet applications, connects user requests to datacenters, manages traffic to apps, and improves app availability with automatic failover.
Application Gateway is a layer 7 load balancer. It supports SSL termination, cookie-based session affinity, and round robin for load-balancing traffic.
Private Endpoint provides secured, private connectivity to various Azure platform as a service (PaaS) resources, over a backbone Microsoft private network.
VNet peering is a mechanism that connects two virtual networks (VNets) in the same region through the Azure backbone network. Once peered, the two virtual networks appear as one for all connectivity purposes.
Azure Front Door is a modern cloud content delivery network (CDN) service that delivers high performance, scalability, and secure user experiences for your content and applications.
Learn how to deploy network virtual appliances for high availability in Azure. This article includes example architectures for ingress, egress, and both.
See a secure hybrid network that extends an on-premises network to Azure with a perimeter network between the on-premises network and an Azure virtual network.
Allows users to securely control access to services and resources while offering data security and protection. Create and manage users and groups, and use permissions to allow and deny access to resources.
Azure role-based access control (RBAC) helps you manage who has access to Azure resources, what they can do with those resources, and what areas they have access to.
Provides managed domain services, such as domain join, group policy, LDAP, and Kerberos/NTLM authentication, which are fully compatible with Windows Server Active Directory.
Azure Policy is a service in Azure that you use to create, assign, and manage policies. These policies enforce different rules and effects over your resources so those resources stay compliant with your corporate standards and service-level agreements.
Azure management groups provide a level of scope above subscriptions. You organize subscriptions into containers called "management groups" and apply your governance conditions to the management groups. All subscriptions within a management group automatically inherit the conditions applied to the management group. Management groups give you enterprise-grade management at a large scale, no matter what type of subscriptions you have.
Provides security solution and works with other services by providing a way to manage, create, and control encryption keys stored in hardware security modules (HSMs).
Provides inbound protection for non-HTTP/S protocols, outbound network-level protection for all ports and protocols, and application-level protection for outbound HTTP/S.
An automated security assessment service that improves the security and compliance of applications. Automatically assess applications for vulnerabilities or deviations from best practices.
Import threat indicators, view logs, create rules to generate security alerts and incidents, and visualize threat intelligence data with Microsoft Sentinel.
Object storage service for use cases that include cloud applications, content distribution, backup, archive, immutable storage, disaster recovery, and big data analytics.
Provides a managed SMB file share that can work with Active Directory for access control. Azure Files can also natively integrate with Microsoft Entra ID.
This option is used to back up and recover files, databases, disks, and virtual machines. Azure Backup also supports backing up compatible on-premises Windows systems.
Azure Files can be deployed in two main ways: by directly mounting the serverless Azure file shares or by caching Azure file shares on-premises using Azure File Sync.
Petabyte-scale to exabyte-scale data transport solution that uses enhanced-security data storage devices to transfer large amounts of data to and from Azure.
Store healthcare data effectively and affordably with cloud-based solutions from Azure. Manage medical records with the highest level of built-in security.
Azure Front Door is a modern cloud content delivery network (CDN) service that delivers high performance, scalability, and secure user experiences for your content and applications.
Easily join your distributed microservices architectures into a single global application using HTTP load balancing and path-based routing rules. Automate turning up new regions and scale-out with API-driven global actions and independent fault-tolerance to your back-end microservices in Azure or anywhere.
Boost productivity with a tailored developer experience, CI/CD workflows to build and deploy your static content hosting, and dynamic scale for integrated serverless APIs.
The e-commerce website includes simple order processing workflows with the help of Azure services. Using Azure Functions and Web Apps, developers can focus on building personalized experiences and let Azure take care of the infrastructure.
This reference architecture shows a serverless web application, which serves static content from Azure Blob Storage and implements an API by using Azure Functions.
Manage virtual desktops and applications to enable corporate network and data access to users, anytime, anywhere, from supported devices. Amazon WorkSpaces support Windows and Linux virtual desktops. Azure Virtual Desktop supports multi-session Windows 10 virtual desktops.
Cloud technology to build distributed applications using out-of-the-box connectors to reduce integration challenges. Connect apps, data, and devices on-premises or in the cloud.
Fully integrated cloud service that provides communications, email, and document management in the cloud and is available on a wide variety of devices.
Serverless technology for connecting apps, data and devices anywhere, whether on-premises or in the cloud for large ecosystems of SaaS and cloud-based connectors.
Azure Stack is a hybrid cloud platform that enables you to run Azure services in your company's or service provider's datacenter. As a developer, you can build apps on Azure Stack. You can then deploy them to either Azure Stack or Azure, or you can build truly hybrid apps that take advantage of connectivity between an Azure Stack cloud and Azure.