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From AWS to Azure

By Scott Duffy, ​softwarearchitect.ca

For those who are familiar with the AWS world, and are coming into Azure, you will find a lot
of similarities between the two platforms. But there might be things getting in the way. To
start, the terminology is different.

So I decided to sit down and put together this guide that will help those familiar with AWS to
get introduced into the world of Azure.

Microsoft has a web page that they maintain to compare AWS to Azure here from a sales
perspective:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-ca/overview/azure-vs-aws/

You can see that Microsoft claims Azure can be 5 times cheaper in some cases than the
pricing of AWS.

Then when we get technical, they have a web page that talks about the services that AWS
offers vs Azure:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/aws-professional/services

The following document will cover what AWS offers, and what Azure offers that is equivalent.

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Table of Contents

Marketplace 3

Compute Offerings 4

Networking Offerings 6

Database Offerings 7

Storage Offerings 8

Security Offerings 9

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Marketplace

Both AWS and Azure have a “marketplace” where vendors offer their computing and
networking products for rent. You can find virtual machines, firewalls, and even clusters of
VMs here.

In Azure, the Marketplace contains over 1000 products to choose from. You can search to
find what you’re looking for, and it’s also organized into categories along the left side so you
can browse.

The filters at the top allow you to narrow your choices by operating system or by Microsoft or
third-party publishers.

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Compute Offerings

In cloud computing, Compute is the concept of turning over your tasks and applications to
the cloud provider to execute. It can be in a virtual machine, or one of their other managed
offerings.

AWS Compute Azure Compute

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Azure Virtual Machines (VM)

AWS Batch Azure Batch

AWS Auto Scaling Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS)

VMware Cloud on AWS Azure VMware by CloudSimple

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 AWS Containers Azure Containers

EC2 Container Service (ECS), Fargate Azure Container Instances (ACI)

EC2 Container Registry Azure Container Registry (ACR)

Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

(EKS)

App Mesh Service Fabric Mesh

AWS Serverless Azure Serverless

Lambda Azure Functions

AWS Step Functions, Simple Workflow Logic Apps

Service (SWF)

AWS Web Applications Azure Web Applications

Elastic Beanstalk App Service

API Gateway API Management

CloudFront Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Global Accelerator Azure Front Door

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Networking Offerings

From the network itself, to load balancers and the way traffic is distributed around your
applications.

AWS Networking Azure Networking

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Virtual Network

AWS VPN Gateway Azure VPN Gateway

Route 53 Azure DNS, Azure Traffic Manager

Direct Connect ExpressRoute

Network Load Balancer Load Balancer

Application Load Balancer Application Gateway

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Database Offerings

The world has evolved past the plain old Relational Database model into many more models
for the Web. Azure and AWS both offer NoSQL and other models. Many of the databases
offered by Azure are “managed” in that they will take care of storage, performance and
scaling for you. You do have to usually select a tier and will pay according to the tier you
chose.

AWS Databases Azure Databases

RDS SQL Database, Azure Database for

MySQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL

DynamoDB, SimpleDB Azure Cosmos DB

ElastiCache Azure Cache for Redis

AWS Database Migration Service Azure Database Migration Service

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Storage Offerings

Storage is one of the three foundational pillars of cloud computing. Many companies start by
putting their long-term storage into the cloud before committing to a full application migration,
because growing storage needs are one of the ongoing problems for companies that use
hosted solutions, and saving money on storage is fairly easy to do.

AWS Storage Azure Storage

Simple Storage Service (S3) Azure Blob Storage

Elastic Block Store (EBS) Azure Managed Disks

Elastic File System Azure Files

S3 Infrequent Access (IA) Azure Storage, cool tier

S3 Glacier Azure Storage, archive tier

AWS Backup Azure Backup

Storage Gateway StorSimple

AWS Import/Export Disk Import/Export

Snowball, Snowball Edge, Snowmobile Azure Data Box

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Security Offerings

We can’t get far in a conversation about cloud computing without talking about security.
There have been some high-profile incidents in recent years of data being taken from cloud
storage accounts, and we have to be ever vigilant to watch for making sure our data and
applications are secure.

AWS Authentication Azure Authentication

Identity and Access Management (IAM) Azure Active Directory, Role Based Access
Control

AWS Organizations Azure Subscription Management, Azure

Policy, Management Groups

Multi-Factor Authentication Multi-Factor Authentication

AWS Directory Service Azure AD Domain Services (AD DS)

Cognito Azure AD B2C

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 AWS Encryption Azure Encryption

Server-side encryption with Amazon S3 Key Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)

Management Service

Key Management Service, CloudHSM Azure Key Vault

AWS Firewall Azure Firewall

Web Application Firewall Application Gateway with Web Application

Firewall (WAF), Azure Firewall

AWS Security Azure Security

Inspector Security Center

Certificate Manager App Service Certificates

GuardDuty Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)

AWS Artifact Service Trust Portal

AWS Shield Azure DDoS Protection

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Summary

Hopefully this has helped you see the different types of services offered on each platform. In
most cases, there is an 1-for-1 equivalent service on AWS for any Azure service, and vice
versa. Ocassionally, there are two or three services that make up an equivalence.

Let me know if there’s anything not clear here, or anything that needs correcting.

Scott

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