A comparison of the Azure and AWS cloud ecosystems circa fall 2014.

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Amazon Web Services vs.
Microsoft Azure

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TL;DR

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 Originally designed for internal use
 History
 Simple Queue Service – late 2004
 Mechanical Turk – late 2005
 EC2 and S3 – 2006
 >$1B in revenue/quarter (estimate)
 8 distinct geographic regions + GovCloud
 Customers - Netflix, NASA, Pinterest, Expedia,
Instagram, Heroku
AWS overview

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 Announced at PDC October 2008
 Initially focused on PaaS
 Commercial release Feb 2010
 150% YoY growth (2Q2014), ~ $4.5B annual revenue
 Includes Office 365, etc.
 13 geographic regions + 2 gov-related
 Customers – Apple iCloud (!), Vancouver and Sochi
Olympics, Toyota, etc.
Azure overview

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Features and Capabilities
Performance/Scale/Reliability
Cost
Developer Productivity
Management

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Features and Capabilities

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 36 distinct, marketed capabilities across 8 categories
 About 24 (give or take) are standalone
 Rest only make sense in the context of others
 Focus areas
 IaaS – EC2, Virtual Private Cloud, etc.
 Storage – S3, Elastic Block Storage, CDN, etc.
 PaaS offering (Elastic Beanstalk) is not really a first-class citizen
 Developer-centric services offerings
 Managed (No)SQL, data warehousing, Hadoop, queues, workflows, emails, push
notifications, etc.
 Handful of “others”
 AppStream, WorkSpaces, etc.
AWS Features

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 27 distinct, marketed capabilities across 7 categories
 About 18 (give or take) are standalone
 Areas of focus
 PaaS – Web Sites, Mobile Services, Cloud Services
 Storage – blobs, tables, queues, files
 IaaS
 Developer-centric services
 Managed (No)SQL, queues, Hadoop, service bus, push notifications,
etc.
 “Others”
 RemoteApp, API Management, etc.
Azure Features

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 IaaS
 Run anything in a VM
 Extend your datacenter into the cloud (virtual networks, etc.)
 Storage
 Raw, NoSQL, SQL, big data, CDN
 Access control
 IAM and Azure AD
 Legacy-application-as-a-service
 AWS AppStream and Azure RemoteApp
Commonality

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 “View of the world”
 AWS – VM-first
 Azure – services-first
 PaaS – Azure has a clear advantage here
 Hybrid cloud connectivity – Azure has more emphasis, options
 Mobile back-ends
 Azure Mobile Services – mature, full-featured
 Amazon Cognito/Analytics/SNS – new offering, promising but still early days
 Azure has obvious ties into MS developer ecosystem
 Will Amazon create their own dev ecosystem?
 Feature differentiation
 Azure – native API Management
 AWS – native OLAP data warehousing
Key Differences

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Performance/Scale/Reliability

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 Server estimates (May 2013)
 160K web-facing (11.6M distinct, public web sites)
 50K non-web-facing
 VM sizes
 22 instance sizes across 7 categories
 General purpose, micro, compute-optimized, memory-optimized, storage-optimized, etc.
 On-demand, reserved, and spot pricing models
 Database sizes
 11 instances sizes across 3 categories (standard, memory-optimized, micro)
 SLA
 EC2 and RDS – 99.95%
 S3 – 99.9%
 Scale out – load balance All The Things
 Scale up – up to 32 cores, 244 GB of RAM per instance
AWS perf/scale/reliability

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 Server estimates (July 2013)
 19K web-facing (170K distinct, public web sites)
 VM sizes
 10 instance sizes across 3 categories
 General purpose, compute-intensive, memory-intensive
 Fewer options than AWS (no GPU, storage-optimized, etc.)
 Database sizes
 8 instance sizes across 2 categories (general purpose, memory-intensive)
 SLA
 VMs and Cloud Services – 99.95%
 Pretty much everything else – 99.9%
 Scale out – load balancing using Traffic Manager (across one or more regions)
 Scale up – up to 16 cores, 112 GB of RAM per instance
Azure perf/scale/reliability

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Cost

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 Budget and tax implications
 Capex – Big, depreciating assets on the
balance sheet
 Opex - Fluid, less predictable (but smaller) ongoing expenses
 Developers – no longer downstream from IT decisions
 Public cloud allows “end-run” around traditional IT
 We control the meter (for better… and worse)
 “Spend” is now a noun
 You’re welcome
 Price usually not a differentiator
Economics o’ the Cloud

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 Generally a pay-as-you-go model
 Paying the water bill vs. digging your own well
 Free usage tier
 12 month limit for new accounts
 Monthly credit for Linux/Windows micro VMs, relational and NoSQL
storage, etc.
 Discounts for education and startups
 Convenience vs. commitment
 On-Demand vs. Reserved vs. Spot Instances
 Here Be Complexity
 Whitepapers, how-to videos, VC-backed third party providers, etc.
AWS Pricing

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 Largely a pay-as-you-go, rental model
 Discounts for 6 and 12 month commitments, prepayments
 Try before you buy - $200 credit for new signups
 Free credits for schools, startups, and MSDN
subscribers
 Again with the complexity
 What services are you using?
 How many?
 Which options?
Azure Pricing

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Developer Productivity

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 Multiple tech stack SDKs
 Java, iOS, Android, PHP, Ruby, Python, .NET, browser
 Package management integration – npm, NuGet, gems, pip,
composer, etc.
 Eclipse and VS.NET integration
 Command line – Windows (cmd.exe and PS), Mac, Linux
 Excellent SDK and services docs
 https://aws.amazon.com/documentation
 Active forums
 https://forums.aws.amazon.com
 No officially supported, unified local emulator
AWS Developer Productivity

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 SDKs to target multiple tech stacks
 .NET, Java, node, iOS, Android, Windows 8, WinPhone, PHP, Python, Ruby, browser
 Package mgmt. integration – npm, NuGet, gems, pip, composer, etc.
 Eclipse and VS.NET integration
 Also works with Python and Node Tools for VS.NET
 CLI support across Windows, Mac, Linux
 Auto-deploy from GitHub, Dropbox, TFS, etc.
 Excellent docs - http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation
 Forums are… meh (even MS suggests you use StackOverflow )
 http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/forums
 Local emulator works well… for some stuff
Azure Developer Productivity

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Management

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 Web portal
 Command line (CLI)
 APIs
 Third party integration – VMWare, Rightscale, Scalr, BMC,
Puppet Labs, Layer7, etc.
 Services
 CloudFormation – templated resource creation
 CloudTrail – auto API call logging
 CloudWatch – unified cloud resource and app monitoring
 IAM – security and access control
 OpsWorks – AWS resource integration for DevOps
AWS Management

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 Web portal (two of them, actually)
 Command line
 APIs
 Third party – Cerebrata, BMC, Puppet Labs, etc.
 Immature compared to AWS
 Services
 Recovery Manager – automated backup of Hyper-V private clouds
 Backup – automated on-prem server backup to Azure
 Scheduler – “cron for Azure”
 Active Directory – hosted in Azure, sync with on-prem, etc.
 API Management – versioning, quotas/rate limits, security,
transformations, documentation, reporting, etc.
Azure Management

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 Appreciate how cloud changes IT dynamics
 Winners and losers
 Budget and tax implications
 Understand your SLAs
 99.9% = 10 min/week, 45 min/month, 8.75 hours/year
 99.95% = 5 min/week, 22 min/month, 4.3 hours/year
 Learn the difference between “cloud-capable” and “cloud-native”
 Think beyond the VM
 Still lost?
 Choose AWS because… “no one ever got fired for choosing IBM”
 Choose Azure because… you love PaaS, and/or you’re already within the MS orbit
 …just remember these are broad guidelines!
Advice

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Questions?