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
Microsoft Azure
Score8.5 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.
$29
per month
Pricing
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Microsoft Azure
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
Carrier IP Addresses
$0.005 - $0.10
T4g Instances
$0.04
per vCPU-Hour Linux, RHEL, & SLES
T2, T3 Instances
$0.05 ($0.096)
per vCPU-Hour Linux, RHEL, & SLES (Windows)
Developer
$29
per month
Standard
$100
per month
Professional Direct
$1000
per month
Basic
Free
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Microsoft Azure
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
The free tier lets users have access to a variety of services free for 12 months with limited usage after making an Azure account.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Microsoft Azure
Considered Both Products
Amazon AWS
Verified User
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
I found Microsoft Azure to be very very complex for new users. The dashboard is very intimidating.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud has more popularity and a bigger community to reach out to in case of any issues or help. Found Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud to be the most recommended …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
AWS EC2 is far superior to Microsoft Azure, especially in up time, maintenance and cost.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Sr. Consulting Analyst in Information Technology at StorageIO - www.storageio.com (Information Technology and Services, 1-10 employees)
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
AWS EC2 has been around awhile, it is very extensible, very flexible, very competitive, very evolving, very useful, very many options to do different things, however also meanwhile with hybrid cloud, we also are using Microsoft Azure VMs, as well as VMware vSphere ESXi among …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
AWS EC2 is fully interfaced with the Amazon Web Services platform and Google Compute Engine fits in more with Google. While either provider would have been fine, we are pretty much all built on top of AWS at this point barring some clients. It just flowed easier.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Senior Software Engineer in Engineering at Rocketrip (Computer Software, 11-50 employees)
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Amazon EC2 is the best cloud solution on the market. It has very competitive prices and an incredible number of services available for use. The billing is very efficient and details. EC2 is a great option for individuals, small groups, and large companies. As the needs of …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
In our eyes, Amazon has become the de-facto cloud provider. We have searched for other options, but none of them compare when you take documentation, training, support, ease of use all into account. Of all the cloud environments that our admins use daily, AWS is by far the …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
All the services above can be built on a server vs using a service. It allows teams that have more breadth of development to dive deep into the implementation and tailor the performance based on the needs they have specifically. In addition, we can tear down failed experiments …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Security and cost are the major components which impact end users. We evaluated all the cloud platforms, and found AWS EC2 to be very cheap and more secure than GCP. Due to the improper configuration in AWS, we were compromised several times, then fixed it via some partners. …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
We selected EC2 because of the maturity of the platform, the ease of deployment and the completeness of Amazon's vision. EC2 by itself, stacks up rather evenly with the competition. Where AWS as a whole excels is in the integration. While you may start with EC2 instances, …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Support Lead in Information Technology at TechFox (Internet, 1-10 employees)
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
EC2 is far broader than Microsoft's Azure cloud and offers separation from Microsoft if needed. The product features paired with usability and notoriety are far superior to Microsoft's. I wish I could state the same regarding other Cloud Solutions but we have not explored many
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
EC2 is the original market leader and that is the reason why we chose to go with them, but Microsoft as well as others are catching up. It boils down to price and comfort level. The feature sets are mostly the same and the service will continue to be come commoditized as time …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Lead Technical Engineer in Information Technology at TechFox (Computer Networking, 1-10 employees)
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
EC2 was broader in its offering than Azure seemed to be. Azure documentation I found to be lacking in some respects. EC2's cost model is more supportive of our business model above Azure's. Azure has the benefit of being tightly integrated with Windows/Microsoft products but …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Software Engineer in Engineering at Booster Fuels (Computer Software, 201-500 employees)
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
I currently use GitHub pages and Azure for projects, in addition to EC2. I use GitHub pages for my blog because it's free and convenient, and because my blog is a static site (HTML and client-side JS only) so there's no need for me to pay for an EC2 instance to host a web …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Sr. Solutions Architect in Engineering at FreeTheHustle.Com (Information Technology and Services, 1-10 employees)
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
When it comes to AWS EC2, the technical aspects are about equal to many of the other cloud services, but where AWS EC2 shines at is its management, and growth capabilities. You can start your web based business using AWS for literally zero start-up costs: you use the same …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Microsoft
Verified User
Chose Microsoft Azure
Azure provides an environment that while at time is more pricey, the tight integration with our existing Microsoft-based infrastructure makes it difficult to beat.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
IT Department Manager in Information Technology at Acceptance Solutions Group (Financial Services, 51-200 employees)
Chose Microsoft Azure
Nowadays it is too hard to say why and how one cloud service is better than the other. IT is probably the question that combines a lot of different aspects like price, functionality, how it looks, ease of administration, size of the infrastructure. As for me, it is more …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose Microsoft Azure
Honestly in my opinion there is no one winner in this area. Both Azure and AWS are great in their own way. Pricewise it all depends in where you're from. Options are very similar and quality of what you get as well as the customer service are both great.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Application Consultant in Information Technology at Capgemini (Computer Software, 10,001+ employees)
Chose Microsoft Azure
AWS is competitor and it's leading in cloud space with his wide sprawl of offerings and services. AWS is a ocean once you login you get everything on one console. AWS leads this space with all his offerings and capabilities. But Azure is not behind, it is competing and is …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Suitable for companies that are looking for performance at a competitive price, flexibility to switch instance type even with RI, flexibility to add-on IOPS, option to lower running cost with the regular introduction of new instance type that comes with higher performance but at a lower cost.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Azure is particularly well suited for enterprise environments with existing Microsoft investments, those that require robust compliance features, and organizations that need hybrid cloud capabilities that bridge on-premises and cloud infrastructure. In my opinion, Azure is less appropriate for cost-sensitive startups or small businesses without dedicated cloud expertise and scenarios requiring edge computing use cases with limited connectivity. Azure offers comprehensive solutions for most business needs but can feel like there is a higher learning curve than other cloud-based providers, depending on the product and use case.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Microsoft Azure is highly scalable and flexible. You can quickly scale up or down additional resources and computing power.
You have no longer upfront investments for hardware. You only pay for the use of your computing power, storage space, or services.
The uptime that can be achieved and guaranteed is very important for our company. This includes the rapid maintenance for security updates that are mostly carried out by Microsoft.
The wide range of capabilities of services that are possible in Microsoft Azure. You can practically put or create anything in Microsoft Azure.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The choices on AMIs, instance types and additional configuration can be overwhelming for any non-DevOps person.
The pricing information should be more clear (than only providing the hourly cost) when launching the instance. AWS DynamoDB gives an estimated monthly cost when creating tables, and I would love to see similar cost estimation showing on EC2 instances individually, as not all developers gets access to the actual bills.
The term for reserving instances are at least 12 months. With instance types changing so fast and better instances coming out every other day, it's really hard to commit to an existing instance type for 1 or more years at a time.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The cost of resources is difficult to determine, technical documentation is frequently out of date, and documentation and mapping capabilities are lacking.
The documentation needs to be improved, and some advanced configuration options require research and experimentation.
Microsoft's licensing scheme is too complex for the average user, and Azure SQL syntax is too different from traditional SQL.
Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.
You an start using EC2 instances immediately, is so easy and intuitive to start using them, EC2 has wizard to create the EC2 instances in the web browser or if you are code savvy you can create them with simple line in the CLI or using an SDK. Once you are comfortable using EC2, you can even automate the process.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
As Microsoft Azure is [doing a] really good with PaaS. The need of a market is to have [a] combo of PaaS and IaaS. While AWS is making [an] exceptionally well blend of both of them, Azure needs to work more on DevOps and Automation stuff. Apart from that, I would recommend Azure as a great platform for cloud services as scale.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We were running Windows Server and Active Directory, so [Microsoft] Azure was a seamless transition. We ran into a few, if any support issues, however, the availability of Microsoft Azure's support team was more than willing and able to guide us through the process. They even proposed solutions to issues we had not even thought of!
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.
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.
As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment options.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
It reduced the need for heavy on-premises instances. Also, it completely eliminates maintenance of the machine. Their SLA criteria are also matching business needs. Overall IAAS is the best option when information is not so crucial to post on the cloud.
It makes both horizontal and vertical scaling really easy. This keeps your infrastructure up and running even while you are increasing the capacity or facing more traffic. This leads to having better customer satisfaction.
If you do not choose your instance type suitable for your business, it may incur lots of extra costs.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
For about 2 years we didn't have to do anything with our production VMs, the system ran without a hitch, which meant our engineers could focus on features rather than infrastructure.
DNS management was very easy in Azure, which made it easy to upgrade our cluster with zero downtime.
Azure Web UI was easy to work with and navigate, which meant our senior engineers and DevOps team could work with Azure without formal training.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
