09 May Azure vs AWS: which is cheaper?
As the battle over gaining and keeping cloud customers heats up it is useful to ask which of the two cloud vendors is cheaper?
The answer is: it depends. There are so many different services offered, from storage to database to compute that there is no single answer to that question. We can take a couple common scenarios, however, and look at prices for those. Here we look at current pricing for a couple different compute scenarios as of April 2016.
Medium Size Machine
A typical machine for many workloads is one with 2 CPU’s and 8GB of RAM running Windows Server 2012. Let’s take a look!
Amazon AWS
On Amazon Web Services a 2 CPU, 8GB or RAM, 280GB SSD Drive will cost you $121/month in the US West 1 zone (Northern California).
Microsoft Azure
On Microsoft Azure, a 2 CPU, 7GB or RAM, 100 GB SSD Drive will cost you $208 — almost twice as much for less RAM and drive space.
OK, AWS beats Amazon out good on the compute. But what about a managed SQL Server?
Amazon AWS
On AWS a managed SQL Server instance with a standard license for SQL Server on a db3.medium instance (the smallest for SQL server) is $483/ month
Microsoft Azure
On Azure a managed standard license SQL Server instance with 100GB of storage is $223/month — not quite half the price of Amazon.
While these comparisons are not apples to apples, as the configurations vary a bit, they are pretty close. What this makes clear is different clouds are better for different things. If you goal is to host SQL Server you are probably better of on Azure. If you want pure compute power, Amazon Web Services may be better.
Let CloudFast help figure out what the best option is for you and help you implement it! Contact us today!