Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Users can launch instances with a variety of OSs, load them with custom application environments, manage network access permissions, and run images on multiple systems.
$0.01
per IP address with a running instance per hour on a pro rata basis
Azure Virtual Machines
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Virtual Machines (VMs) are available on Microsoft Azure, providing what is built as a low-cost, per-second compute service, available via Windows or Linux.
$0
Per Hour
Pricing
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Azure Virtual Machines
Editions & Modules
Data Transfer
$0.00 - $0.09
per GB
On-Demand
$0.0042 - $6.528
per Hour
EBS-Optimized Instances
$0.005
per IP address with a running instance per hour on a pro rata basis
Amazon was the first one in the market to provide virtual machines in the cloud and certainly gained a lot of popularity before the rest even came to the picture. The different service providers are quite mutually exclusive, and one cannot easily use more than one at the same …
We have been using EC2 for so much longer, that even though we use Azure's other features and services more then the equivalent AWS features and services, we don't usually go for Azure's VM offerings first over EC2. I guess that that means this recommendation is mostly based …
Azure VM's are far way cost effective than the AWS EC2 service also Azure VM's provides up Smart Hybrid Cloud integration with the Existing on Prem architecture. One of the key feature of Azure VM are they provide High availability and data redundant zones for the VM to be hosted.
We use both Azure and AWS VM services currently. AWS' EC2s have been around for longer an offer a much more reliable Linux OS support. But the gap getting smaller by the day, and Azure VMs are catching up nicely. In our case, we use a lot AWS for Linux-based applications …
I have tested AWS EC2 instances, however, we chose
Azure Virtual Machines as we use SCOM as an enterprise monitoring solution and it goes very well
with Azure as monitoring. We have a lot of customers on Azure and monitoring the Azure environment with SCOM is easy through
More or less these are comparable offerings in my opinion as a user of both the AWS and Azure Clouds in a business environment in which there's a use case for a multi-cloud environment. We were able to complete a feature parody between the Azure Cloud and AWS Cloud for key …
Azure has a better interface than its competitors like Amazon and IBM. It is more intuitive and easier to use. It also has more features like connection troubleshooting, boot diagnostics, and running remote commands.
Users of both Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) and Azure Virtual Machines have found that these services meet their needs for flexible, scalable computing power. Customers have leveraged EC2 and Azure VM for diverse use cases, ranging from data processing and web hosting to running enterprise-scale applications. Both products have been particularly praised by users for their seamless scalability, helping organizations manage peak demand periods without investing in excessive physical infrastructure.
The core difference between how users utilize Amazon EC2 and Azure VM lies primarily in platform preference. Users have noted that EC2 integrates well with other AWS services, and tends to be favored by organizations that are already heavily invested in the AWS ecosystem. On the other hand, Azure VM is generally preferred by users deeply integrated into Microsoft’s ecosystem, as it has a native advantage when it comes to interoperability with other Microsoft products, such as Windows Server, Active Directory, and SQL Server.
Overall, users found that while both products provide robust and scalable virtual computing environments, the choice between the two often depends on the broader IT infrastructure and software landscape within the organization. This implies that users may opt for either EC2 or Azure VM based on their existing commitments and strategic alignment with Amazon’s or Microsoft’s suite of services and products. Thus, while individual product features play a role, the larger ecosystem in which these services are embedded significantly influences user preferences and usage.
Features
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Azure Virtual Machines
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
9.3
21 Ratings
14% above category average
Azure Virtual Machines
-
Ratings
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
9.820 Ratings
00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling
9.320 Ratings
00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing
9.620 Ratings
00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates
8.720 Ratings
00 Ratings
Monitoring tools
8.720 Ratings
00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images
9.020 Ratings
00 Ratings
Operating system support
9.320 Ratings
00 Ratings
Security controls
9.720 Ratings
00 Ratings
Automation
9.310 Ratings
00 Ratings
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
AWS EC2 is well suited for almost any scenario, you can run any software that is compatible (x86_64, arm, mac), and you have plenty of instances types to choose with little or massive memory, the same for CPU and disk space. You even can run in a non-virtual EC2, that is a physical server we you have all the resources available to you, perfect for some very strict industries or by some licenses rules. I can't think of an scenario where EC2 is not appropriate.
If you want to host a dedicated Windows server on the cloud, and especially if you want to integrate it with your on premises Active Directory, Azure Virtual Machines should be your first choice. Obviously running Linux on Azure works very well too, but given Azure's pricing is not the cheapest, there are other providers out there that have a better cost-benefit ratio for Linux. That said, hosting Windows on Azure can be affordable (especially when compared to other providers) if you plan your licensing, topology, and application architecture correctly.
A great variety of choices in Amazon Machine Image (AMI) types. Users can select a more basic type to run generic workloads, but also have the choice to pick an AMI pre-installed with specific services in the AWS Marketplace.
The range of instance types can support the usage from a student's exploration (inexpensive general-purpose nano instances) to an enterprise's most intense workloads (memory or storage-optimized instances with terabytes of memory and ultra-fast network connection).
The pricing options, from regular instances, reserved instances to spot instances allow users to get the job done and make smart choices about how much they want to pay and when they want to pay.
When demand is high, we scale the service out, eg During a Football Match.
When a football match is over and the throughput of data from OPTA drops we save by the service scaling back in.
Our App Service Plans along with the Clean C# code are lightening fast giving a good customer experience.
When producing the TV Guide information and a program overruns its scheduled time, a client can instantly be updated to the new programming schedule as our change is instant and its in the right place for all the clients to download and adjust their television guides appropriately to send out to the public giving a 24x7 uptime service that is precise and accurate and resilient to outages due to failover zones around the world.
This service is a bit difficult to consume. New users need a big learning curve to use this service effectively.
UI for EC2 service is a little complex and at many places, it misses detailed explanation.
Sometimes it takes too long to create images of EC2 instances. This keeps your EC2 up for that extra time. When instances are heavy, it penalizes a lot of money.
Pricing can be a concern if you are truly agnostic to which cloud you are building your particular solution in.
The UI, as is the case with any cloud provider, is crowded.
As with any cloud provider, it can be difficult to tune in exactly the right amount of servers for your needs...you might find yourself under/overprovisioning.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides everything we need for running some of our vendor's software packages and gives us a range of additional features over running on-premise - such as backups, security and operational monitoring which would require additional implementation running in our own datacenters, this allows us to get started quicker and provides us a reduced Total Cost of Ownership
AWS's support is good overall. Not outstanding, but better than average. We have had very little reason to engage with AWS support but in our limited experience, the staff has been knowledgeable, timely and helpful. The only negative is actually initiating a service request can be a bit of a pain.
I give the overall support for Azure Virtual Machines a 7 because I think while the overall support do a great job there are still areas that it could improve on such as efficiency and speed. So while I only give it a 7 and it has some issues it is still better than the overall support at Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.
Amazon EC2 is super flexible compared to the PaaS offerings like Heroku Platform and Google App Engine since with Amazon EC2, we have access to the terminal. In terms of pricing, it's basically just the same as Google Compute Engine. The deciding factor is Amazon EC2's native integration with other AWS services since they're all in the same cloud platform.
Azure Virtual Machines offer unparalleled flexibility in provisioning, managing and upgrading the VM instances, both manually and programmatically. AVM offer very granular billing options and enables high costs optimisations (while still being costly). The other competitors I mentioned are very good at offering dead-cheap VMs. But if you need anything beyond that, especially for big computing, you need Azure Virtual Machines.
Instance procurement time has become negligible with EC2. Any developer can provision an instance very quickly and companies can move towards automation of CI/CD pipelines and auto provisioning of EC2s.
Companies do not have to spend money in managing infrastructures, data centers, staff to manage these, networking, connectivity etc. All this will be taken care by AWS and EC2 can be used to run your enterprise softwares and custom applications.
If not correctly monitored EC2 prices can run up very quickly. So proper monitoring has to be in place in your organization. Non-prod and dev EC2 servers should be brought down in evening and night.
It's so easy to spin up new instances, that it becomes also to easy to have to many of them to manage. Many teams end up with a couple of hundreds of VMs after a short while, making the whole thing very hard to maneuver
Azure VMs are the next step for us to rely on Onprem servers, and leaving the management of the infrastructure to the professionals
The ease of use, is also important when our main focus is to deliver new applications and integrations fast, and not having to worry about infrastructure. We sell bottles, not CPUs
