Make sure you're looking at Linux or Windows VMs for both, Azure's ~3-4Gb RAM Linux VMs run $70-$90/mo, whereas their Windows (the default on the pricing page)

Make sure you're looking at Linux or Windows VMs for both, Azure's ~3-4Gb RAM Linux VMs run $70-$90/mo, whereas their Windows (the default on the pricing page) are $115-$135/mo. All of Azure's VM offerings also include hard disk storage, which is extra on AWS. Also, if you look at Azure's Compute Optimized VM running Linux at 3.5Gb RAM, it comes down to $57/mo, which is much closer and includes 50GB of SSD storage, which Amazon doesn't do at that price point. Also, things like NoSQL databases are completely impossible to compare apples to apples (AWS DynamoDB vs Azure DocumentDB are priced completely differently: DynamoDB is priced on both storage and request streams, DocumentDB is priced on requests/second only) Cloud pricing is complicated - what else is new?