Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs. Microsoft Azure

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
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
Score 8.6 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
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsThe 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 Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
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 …
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
AWS EC2 is far superior to Microsoft Azure, especially in up time, maintenance and cost.
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 …
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.
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 …
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 …
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 …
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Still ahead of the rest of the pack.
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Performs well and competitive price. Clear Documentation would be another factor. I have found sometimes documentations are confusing and misleading.
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. …
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, …
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
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 …
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 …
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 …
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
We ended up not selecting EC2, we chose Google Compute Engine instead. Reason for us choosing GCE was due to:
  1. Ability to define custom compute units in GCE.
  2. More transparent pricing due to automatic usage discounts.
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 …
Microsoft Azure
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.
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 …
Chose Microsoft Azure
The advantage of Microsoft Azure compared to competing tools is that Azure integrates nicely with the other Microsoft tools. Another advantage of Azure is that it has attempted to be quite user-friendly. The disadvantage of Azure is that it is relatively slow compared to …
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.
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 …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Microsoft Azure
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
9.1
18 Ratings
11% above category average
Microsoft Azure
8.6
17 Ratings
6% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime8.617 Ratings8.716 Ratings
Dynamic scaling9.317 Ratings9.316 Ratings
Elastic load balancing9.217 Ratings8.816 Ratings
Pre-configured templates9.517 Ratings7.016 Ratings
Monitoring tools8.117 Ratings8.016 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images9.817 Ratings8.415 Ratings
Operating system support9.617 Ratings9.516 Ratings
Security controls9.617 Ratings9.016 Ratings
Automation8.47 Ratings8.715 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Microsoft Azure
Small Businesses
Linode
Linode
Score 9.0 out of 10
Linode
Linode
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Microsoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(65 ratings)
8.5
(88 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(15 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(3 ratings)
9.0
(27 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
6.8
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
8.5
(12 ratings)
8.8
(27 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Microsoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
I think nowadays, Amazon EC2 is best-suited for most app development and deployment use cases, especially if your resource requirements are not fixed over a long period of time. The flexibility provided by the on-demand pricing and rescaling option makes Amazon EC2 a great service, especially if your tech stack already runs on AWS. On the other hand, I think Amazon EC2 is not the best option if your tech infrastructure runs on another public cloud.
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Microsoft
In terms of cloud computing, Microsoft Azure is the only comprehensive result the company offers. Regardless of how big or small an organization is, it can make use of this system. As a cyber-security professional, this is your best option for data management. A business that wants to minimize capital expenditures can use Microsoft Azure. Many Microsoft services accept it. People with little or no knowledge of cloud computing may find it impossible. It isn’t the solution for companies that don’t want to risk having only one platform and infrastructure vendor.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • 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.
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Microsoft
  • Azure simply provides end to end life cycle. Starting from the development to automated deployment, you will find [a] bunch of options. Custom hook-points allow [integration] on-premise resources as well.
  • Excellent documentation around all the services make it really easy for any novice. Overall support by [the] community and Azure Technical team is exceptional.
  • BOT Services, Computer Vision services, ML frameworks provide excellent results as compare to similar services provided by other giants in the same space.
  • Azure data services provide excellent support to ingest data from different sources, ETL, and consumption of data for BI purpose.
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • 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.
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Microsoft
  • In our experience, Azure Kubernetes Survice was difficult to set up, which is why we used Kubernetes on top of VMs.
  • Azure REST API is a bit difficult to use, which made it difficult for us to automate our interactions with Azure.
  • Azure's Web UI does a good job of showing metrics on individual VMs, but it would be great if there was a way to show certain metrics from multiple VMs on one dashboard. For example, hard drive usage on our database VMs.
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Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
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.
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Usability
Amazon AWS
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows various ways of gaining incidents, such as slow growth, money, and the reserved ones, mostly depend entirely on the necessity, because it makes highly intelligent choices possible at these times, which enable considerable cost savings whilst addressing the situation as best I like.
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Microsoft
Microsoft Azure's overall usability has been better than expected. Often times vendors promise the world, only to leave you with a run-down town. Not the case with our experience. From an implementation perspective, all went perfect, and from the user-facing experience we have had no technical issues, just some learning curve issues that are more about "why" than "how"
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Reliability and Availability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
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.
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Microsoft
Support is easy with all the knowledge base articles available for free on the web. Plus, if you have a preferred status you can leverage their concierge support to get rapid response. Sometimes they’ll bounce you around a lot to get you to the right person, but they are quite responsive (especially when you are paying for the service). Many of the older Microsoft skills are also transferable from old-school on-prem to Azure-based virtual interfaces.
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Implementation Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
Azure VM and Google Compute Engine are alternatives to EC2. AWS EC2 is most matures and advanced of the 3. All these provide easy-to-deploy and automatically configured third-party applications, including single virtual machine or multiple virtual machine solutions.
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Microsoft
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.
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • AWS has had a very positive return on investment for every client we have that uses it. They are saving money in the long run.
  • AWS includes the underlying operating system licenses with their EC2 instances so no longer do we have to navigate through Microsoft licensing headache.
  • EC2 allows us to easily create a golden image of servers and store them as AMIs. This makes spinning up new servers that need a particular set of software in the future extremely easy and cost-effective.
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Microsoft
  • Brings down Capex to customers.
  • Some of the built-in security features of DDoS Basic protection that comes with VNET on Azure or even WAF on AGW brings huge advantages to customers.
  • Hybrid benefits for those who have software assurance can save even more costs by moving to Azure.
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ScreenShots