Can Azure beat AWS?
AWS enjoyed the first-mover status, and for a reason, Amazon is the dominant cloud platform. It has innovated so many products and services that we won’t be able to cover in this single article. Every year Amazon comes up with the new tools and makes it harder and harder for the competition to grumble Amazon. A long-ago Microsoft realized the future lies in the Cloud and has invested heavily to get a piece of the pie. The products Microsoft has in the basket of Azure continues to grow and making it hard to find a reason to say Azure can’t do it.
Let’s find out what Azure has to offer that beats AWS.
1 — Azure Hybrid benefit
Hybrid Cloud is a computing environment that integrates public cloud and private cloud by allowing data and applications to be shared between them. Hybrid cloud computing can scale business on-premises infrastructure up to the public cloud while providing third-party datacenters with access to their entire data and calculating demand and volatility. Companies gain the flexibility and computing power of the public cloud for basic and sensitive computer tasks while keeping business-critical applications and data on campus, secure behind a company’s firewall.
The use of a hybrid cloud not only allows companies to scale computing resources, but also eradicates the need for massive capital expenditures to handle short-term spikes in demand, and when business needs to free up their local resources for more critical data or applications. Companies pay only for temporary resources rather than buying, programming, and maintaining additional supplies and equipment that have been idle for a long time. Hybrid cloud computing is the “best of all possible worlds” platform, which offers all the benefits of cloud computing — flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency — with minimal risk of data exposure.
2 — .Net Framework compatibility
Are you a Web App developer then you might be knowing there is no better place to work than Azure. The company continues its long tradition with many more Microsoft first products and .NET, ASP, C#. You will feel more at home here than anywhere else. Of course, you can take the time to learn one of the new complex architectures or toolkits, or make the work faster.
Azure was one of the first to support the new open-source framework. Azure’s App Service supports Node.js, PHP, Java, Ruby, Python, and a few more options. From starting and even now, Microsoft is very committed to exploring all the possibilities emerging from the open-source world, and this may come in handy if you decide to start moving your .NET stack in that direction.
3 — Cloud regions
As we all know, the best thing about Cloud is the way it abstracts the headache about the Physical machines and all those servers down the hall with those leaky roofs and sketchy air conditioner.
However, there are some practical and legal reasons you should know where your data is precisely sitting, and sometimes we want geographical diversification because of natural calamities. Azure knows about these issues and solves this with its most number of data centers.
Suggested read: Azure Region Pairs for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
4 — MS office integration
Microsoft office is used by most of the enterprises and continues to be the foundation that supports the entire operation. Microsoft has built a seamless integration experience with the existing ecosystem and Azure. MS Word, Powerpoint, and Excel have migrated to the cloud and which makes it evident that Azure does a better job by supporting these productivities than rivals.
5 — R language
R is a programming language and free software environment for statistical computing and graphics supported by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. Polls, data mining surveys, and studies of scholarly literature databases show substantial increases in popularity; as of November 2019, R ranks 16th in the TIOBE index, a measure of the popularity of programming languages. (Source: wikipedia.org)
Microsoft has fully embraced the R programming language as a first-class tool for data scientists. By providing many different options for R developers to run their code in Azure, the company is enabling data scientists to extend their data science workloads into the cloud when tackling large-scale projects. (Source: microsoft.com)
Suggested Read: Can Google Cloud beat AWS?
