When the now-rescued princess asks Westley how he prevailed, he explains: “They were both poisoned. I’ve spent the last few years building an immunity to iocane powder.”
In a weird way, successful software development is a bit like that. Often you have to choose from two cups—Windows or Mac, iOS or Android, Xamarin or React Native, to cite some examples. It’s best that the development team (if not individual developers) are familiar with either technology choice, so as to provide their customers with the best possible solution.
AndPlus is no exception, which is why we’ve developed immunity—er, expertise—in many different technologies. One of the most recent pairs of cups we’ve dealt with is Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
Azure is Microsoft’s suite of cloud-based services. Like AWS, Azure provides compute, storage, and database services, in addition to specialized solutions for big-data search, machine learning, content delivery network (CDN), and internet of things (IoT), among others.
Unsurprisingly, Microsoft Azure plays well with other Microsoft products—Microsoft Windows Server, of course, but also products such as SQL Server, Active Directory, SharePoint, and System Center, not to mention the Visual Studio and .NET friendly developer tools. Experienced Windows Server system administrators and developers feel right at home with Azure. What may be surprising, however, is Azure’s extensive support for Linux; a customer can spin up a Linux virtual server with the same ease and speed as that of a Windows Server instance.
How do Microsoft Azure and AWS stack up against each other? For the most part, services available on one have equivalents on the other. Like AWS, Microsoft operates a global network of data centers, soon to include two in Africa (where AWS has no presence), and thus Azure can offer similar high-availability, CDN, and disaster recovery services. Therefore, from a service offering perspective, the two are quite similar.
The support offerings are similar as well, with multiple tiers of support and a variety of service level agreements (SLAs). Service reliability is also similar between the two—both have had outages of various kinds and durations in their history, but overall they both are extremely reliable.
So how do they differ?
At AndPlus, we have had success deploying client projects with both AWS and Microsoft Azure. We have enough experience with each to tell which choice is best for a given project, accounting for service offerings, support, total cost, and performance. We can guide you to the right solution and the right cloud platform, too. Bring us your ideas and we’ll recommend the right cloud goblet. No immunity required.