An Insight of AWS vs Azure Pricing
Amazon Web Services have gained a substantial hold in the cloud market and was a go-to for most of the people who wanted to start their cloud journey. But Microsoft Azure has caught up a lot in the recent few years and is giving a good competition to AWS. This tussle between these two cloud service providers is quite exciting for consumers as it has given them options to choose from.
There has been an argument that comparing cloud prices is not a great option because they keep changing and there are many variables included in the calculation of cloud costs. You have to pay prices according to your region, operating systems and many such factors. This comparison can also be affected by the discount plans that the cloud service provider has to offer.
Despite all the factors that we mentioned, there is a need for comparing the pricing of AWS and Azure because at the surface both services may look similar but there are many points in which they differ and you need a better understanding of what do they offer. Let us look at the factors that affect both AWS and Azure pricing:
Factors affecting AWS and Azure Price
What are the different types of Instances offered by AWS and Azure?
- Both AWS and Azure have three general instances types i.e., General Purpose, Compute Optimized, and Storage optimized.
- If you need some instances urgently they both give you the option of On-Demand Instances which are priced according to the number of CPUs and the amount of storage you use.
- For your long term usage, you might want to use instances that are cheaper and offer way more value than normal instances. For this purpose, they both offer Reserved Instances to which you commit to either for one year or 3 years. But Azure gives you only one option that you have to pay the whole amount upfront whereas in AWS you have the option to full upfront, partially upfront and partially monthly and the whole amount monthly.
What are the storage options that they both provide?
- AWS and Azure provide you with different types of storage options with the first being standard storage option that you access frequently and it is charged according to a standard charge for the first 50TB and after that, you have to pay a discounted price for 51–500TB and after 500TB.
- There might be some data that you don’t have to access frequently, so for that, both AWS and Azure offer you infrequent access storage. Azure has two types of storage i.e., Infrequent Access and Archive storage whereas AWS offers an additional storage option besides these two called One-Zoned Infrequent Access.
- Both of these cloud service platforms also offer you block storage options. In this case also, Azure gives you two types of storage options of HDD and SSD but AWS offers a free tier option also that has 30GB storage in addition to HDD and SSD.
How do they charge for other services?
Azure and AWS have different strategies when it comes to charging for services and additional things. Azure charges its customers per hour for most of its services and per second when it comes to Windows Virtual Machines and Container Resources. On the other hand, AWS also charges per hour for most of its services but it charges per second for Linux On-Demand and Reserved Instances.
What are the Discount Plans offered by AWS and Azure?
Both AWS and Azure offer Reserved Instances for long term usage and in addition to that they are discounted so that you can save a substantial amount of money. AWS has AWS EC2 Reserved Instances and Azure has Azure VMs Reserved Instances.
If you’re planning to commit for 1 year then you will benefit more from AWS Reserved Instances as they offer a 42% discount when compared to 36%in Azure for General Purpose category. However, for other instance types its around 41% for both.
In the case of 3 years of commitment, you will get a benefit of 62%from AWS Reserved Instances and 58% in Azure when General Purpose Instances are concerned. They offer similar benefits when it comes to Compute and Storage instances.
Still have queries? We can help you
We at Oplyft are cloud enthusiasts and have a team of professionals that have deep down knowledge of both AWS and Azure. The struggle of cloud services doesn’t end even after you choose your preferred provider. Organizations struggle to keep up with their cloud bills and this is where we step in. We have an AIOps framework that optimizes the infrastructure of organizations and by understanding your needs we help you save costs on the cloud.
