Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs Microsoft Azure

• EC2 has wide variety of machine configurations. If the intended solutions are memory heavy, CPU heavy, GPU heavy or IO heavy, EC2 will provide proper machine configurations as per the requirements.
• EC2 has lot of Machine Images to setup OS and required softwares. It also allows you to create the image of your own disk. This facilitates user to stop the EC2 instance without loosing the work. It helps to reduce the bill. The image can be attached again to EC2 to start from the same place from where it was left.
• Amazon allows different way to obtain instances like on-demand, spot and reserved. Depending upon the need, one can take wise decision to save cost and address the situation in the best possible way.

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• Azure Functions is the easiest serverless service to work with in my experience. Easy to ship Node.js functions without bundling dependencies.
• Proactive and responsive support. We've worked with most other cloud providers - Amazon, Google, Oracle. Amazon Web Services' customer support is a black hole and their documentation is worthless. Google and Oracle are better, but Azure's support is responsive and their docs are pretty good.
• Azure's Web UI is pretty easy to work with

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• The UI of AWS is quite hard to familiarize with, along with the infrastructure setup. It's a conglomeration of hundreds of acronyms specific to AWS that must be understood including their minutiae to effectively run a cloud deployment. While AWS' documentation is extensive, their beginner-focused guides could use work.
• Instances become incredibly hard to manage after a critical mass, forcing companies to create their own management applications to fill the void that AWS leaves. Along with this, AWS' SDKs can be very poorly documented making this task exponentially more difficult.
• If you lose your SSH key that is released with the creation of the instance, you lose complete access to the server. While I understand the reasoning behind this decision, MFA recovery would be a nice touch.

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• Could be easier to setup redundancy
• Feels as if there are too many options, bells, and whistles you could add.
• Microsoft Azure functions does not have a "Configure Services" method. Programming Azure functions has a slightly different programming model than does a "normal" API application. I would prefer that the startup process be identical.

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• 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.

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• It has taken a few years of planning and growth (which continue), but we've been able to successfully budget and plan for ever increased capacity by starting first with some Virtual Machines and factoring in on-prem maintenance vs cloud constant improvements. VM (server, compute, networking) costs even out quickly over time and will show savings very soon.
• Because of Azure Application Gateways (which cost very little to set up and maintain), we were able to build a state of the art single-sign-on hub for all of our users and other enterprise platforms (mostly non-Microsoft and non Azure systems), reducing the amount of time to switch among these for workers and increasing overall productivity.
• With Azure Active Directory, we do not need to maintain separate identity systems and can more easily integrate our organizations credentials into authorization for access to other systems.

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