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Having used both... Azure pricing is like a used car dealership. Would you like groups with your active directory, that's an up charge. Every service has a tier

Having used both... Azure pricing is like a used car dealership. Would you like groups with your active directory, that's an up charge. Every service has a tiered pricing model which may be cheaper but requires a ton of cognitive overhead. Now Azure presents it self as a much more cohesive platform that was designed with thought and care in how it worked with all the other tools. AWS feels like 700 two pizza teams designing a cloud all in their own black boxes. If you are using Microsoft workloads, Azure all the way but I would be hard pressed to move otherwise.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
I’ve seen a few orgs who elected to use Azure because they don’t want to give revenue to a competitor, leaving technologists to “make it work.” Who makes technology choices in an org is an important question to ask when interviewing (which C level role, CTO vs CIO vs CFO etc). I have no preference either way, everyone’s money is green.
- kjellsbells 4y ago
  At the level of contacts that these orgs sellers have with enterprises (CxO), I can see why that would be a factor. Microsoft is not in tbe habit of buying pharmacies, airlines and grocery chains. Amazon would make many execs nervous on that ground alone.
  - mathattack 4y ago
    Yes. And they turn off existing customers after they buy tech building blocks. But Azure will struggle if they can’t get a stronger marketing message than “We aren’t Amazon”
vishnugupta 4y ago
> AWS feels like 700 two pizza teams Clearly. Things that seem super obvious and intuitive for an end customer require one to go through multiple hoops to get done. At this point even AWS seem to have give up trying to look at big picture and provide higher level end to end services. They are happy to roll out lower level primitives. I guess there’s a good amount of money to be made by building end to end solutions on top of AWS services.
- oneplane 4y ago
  tl;dr: AWS teams seem to mostly build technology and building blocks, Azure seems to mostly be a continuation of business products and Microsoft-to-Business contracts that happen to be tech-related. It is after all not a "Datacenter emulation as a service" like Microsoft Azure is. There are a handful of 'enduser' SaaS services from AWS, but most of it, as you describe, are primitives used to build other things. This is also where AWS originated from: just an internal system that was built to supply object storage and compute to internal teams. And when you start supplying commodity systems as a service it's just a matter of adopting and adding new services as they become more generic and more commodified. (RDS, container-based compute, FaaS, Load Balancing to name a few very common things that really are the same everywhere) A lot of people are used to specific services like GitHub where you pay for Git hosting, or Salesforce where you pay to get CRM, but those are not building blocks, just like Azure is mostly just "things that windows servers in datacenters used to do" in varying degrees of being managed. You can get a Windows VM and run a MSSQL instance on it, or you can get an MSSQL instance, or you can get a shared SQL partition, it's all the same service but with different contractual obligations, and that is exactly what Microsoft likes to do. That top-down difference is what feeds al the other differences between Azure and AWS (and GCP). This is not to say that they don't have Infrastructure building blocks, or that they don't have anything non-traditional, but it's mostly just pandering to the existing customer base on a business level, and not on a technical level. Same reason some people are stuck with MS Teams, not because it's good, but it was part of the MS contract that was essentially grandfathered in from legacy on-prem Office and Exchange to hosted versions to Microsoft 365. They mostly got people that way because of their failure on the intermediate step (Exchange Online from MS sucked), by simply hosting Sharepoint and Outlook for you, integrating everything else on top of that.
- Aperocky 4y ago
  > lower level primitives. This gives freedom. A lot of hand-holdy services and frameworks might save time for the first MVP product, it then invariably forces you to do insane opinionated dance to work with it any further.
MSM 4y ago
> AWS feels like 700 two pizza teams designing a cloud all in their own black boxes. Couldn't agree with this point more, and it's enough to make me prefer Azure. AWS is taking open source tooling and slapping a very thin veneer on top to make it their own. Almost nothing is cohesive or easily integrated. You can ask the same question to three AWS solution architects and get three similar-but-different stacks suggested. Azure seems to be going the way of solid, simplified, integrations between their tooling (things like Synapse), while AWS is trying to be first to market (or fastest, or cheapest) with all of these individual components.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Yes, the number of comparable & overlapping offerings in AWS is very confusing to someone not fully immersed in it for years and years. There isn't exactly clear comparison matrices or design trees on why you would use one service over the other. It really just feels like 100s of different services that were built for different specific end users and then slowly grown into overlapping offerings. It's worse in big corporate, and especially financial settings as only certain flavors of certain services will get the cyber/infosec blessing. Then you have vendor products you want to use in AWS which only support certain flavors of those same service types as well. So we end up having to bang heads against walls to actually get internal cyber&external vendor onto same page. If the product touches several service types (containers/storage/database/etc) then you have to make sure they can all be strung together in an approved compatible fashion. In the old days a vendor could say they support x86 Linux, and you knew you'd more likely than not be able to install their software. Now you have to go many layers deeper than "we support AWS" to understand if its actually going to work or not, sometimes with multi-week POCs.
- abawany 4y ago
  I have experience with Google Cloud and AWS is overwhelming for me: it is like going to a buffet with 80 varieties of crab rangoons or something - it was really tough to make a choice. I was just trying to enable alerts on a container-hosted service and it took me quite a bit to get there and even then the result is not very nice. Probably my inexperience though.
pwarner 4y ago
Yeah the tiered pricing makes Azure super complex. Azure App Services is crazy. The problem there is there are technical differences too, so it's very hard to sort out what you need. Storage is more complex too. While AWS has lots of challenges from those 700 teams, each services is simpler.
- Melatonic 4y ago
  Sounds like all microsoft licensing. Its ridiculously complicated and even the dedicated people hired to handle JUST that for you will often be confused or not up to date.
  - tanseydavid 4y ago
    In almost 30 years of dealing professionally with MS I have never once been able to get an answer to any licensing question, without the MS rep needing to consulting with others and get back to me. The licensing is complex by intention.
    - Melatonic 4y ago
      Yea they want to confuse you so you buy more stuff! The good reps I have seen make their own matrix or spreadsheets you can go through to see products. Often though I have discovered random smaller and cheaper product lines that save us a ton of money.
202206241203 4y ago
> AWS feels like 700 two pizza teams designing a cloud all in their own black boxes. And Linux (or whatever is even more convoluted) developers forced to do UX.
- timcavel 4y ago

toomuchtodo 4y ago

I’ve seen a few orgs who elected to use Azure because they don’t want to give revenue to a competitor, leaving technologists to “make it work.” Who makes technology choices in an org is an important question to ask when interviewing (which C level role, CTO vs CIO vs CFO etc). I have no preference either way, everyone’s money is green.

kjellsbells 4y ago
At the level of contacts that these orgs sellers have with enterprises (CxO), I can see why that would be a factor. Microsoft is not in tbe habit of buying pharmacies, airlines and grocery chains. Amazon would make many execs nervous on that ground alone.
- mathattack 4y ago
  Yes. And they turn off existing customers after they buy tech building blocks. But Azure will struggle if they can’t get a stronger marketing message than “We aren’t Amazon”

vishnugupta 4y ago

> AWS feels like 700 two pizza teams Clearly. Things that seem super obvious and intuitive for an end customer require one to go through multiple hoops to get done. At this point even AWS seem to have give up trying to look at big picture and provide higher level end to end services. They are happy to roll out lower level primitives. I guess there’s a good amount of money to be made by building end to end solutions on top of AWS services.

oneplane 4y ago
tl;dr: AWS teams seem to mostly build technology and building blocks, Azure seems to mostly be a continuation of business products and Microsoft-to-Business contracts that happen to be tech-related. It is after all not a "Datacenter emulation as a service" like Microsoft Azure is. There are a handful of 'enduser' SaaS services from AWS, but most of it, as you describe, are primitives used to build other things. This is also where AWS originated from: just an internal system that was built to supply object storage and compute to internal teams. And when you start supplying commodity systems as a service it's just a matter of adopting and adding new services as they become more generic and more commodified. (RDS, container-based compute, FaaS, Load Balancing to name a few very common things that really are the same everywhere) A lot of people are used to specific services like GitHub where you pay for Git hosting, or Salesforce where you pay to get CRM, but those are not building blocks, just like Azure is mostly just "things that windows servers in datacenters used to do" in varying degrees of being managed. You can get a Windows VM and run a MSSQL instance on it, or you can get an MSSQL instance, or you can get a shared SQL partition, it's all the same service but with different contractual obligations, and that is exactly what Microsoft likes to do. That top-down difference is what feeds al the other differences between Azure and AWS (and GCP). This is not to say that they don't have Infrastructure building blocks, or that they don't have anything non-traditional, but it's mostly just pandering to the existing customer base on a business level, and not on a technical level. Same reason some people are stuck with MS Teams, not because it's good, but it was part of the MS contract that was essentially grandfathered in from legacy on-prem Office and Exchange to hosted versions to Microsoft 365. They mostly got people that way because of their failure on the intermediate step (Exchange Online from MS sucked), by simply hosting Sharepoint and Outlook for you, integrating everything else on top of that.
Aperocky 4y ago
> lower level primitives. This gives freedom. A lot of hand-holdy services and frameworks might save time for the first MVP product, it then invariably forces you to do insane opinionated dance to work with it any further.

MSM 4y ago

> AWS feels like 700 two pizza teams designing a cloud all in their own black boxes. Couldn't agree with this point more, and it's enough to make me prefer Azure. AWS is taking open source tooling and slapping a very thin veneer on top to make it their own. Almost nothing is cohesive or easily integrated. You can ask the same question to three AWS solution architects and get three similar-but-different stacks suggested. Azure seems to be going the way of solid, simplified, integrations between their tooling (things like Synapse), while AWS is trying to be first to market (or fastest, or cheapest) with all of these individual components.

steveBK123 4y ago
Yes, the number of comparable & overlapping offerings in AWS is very confusing to someone not fully immersed in it for years and years. There isn't exactly clear comparison matrices or design trees on why you would use one service over the other. It really just feels like 100s of different services that were built for different specific end users and then slowly grown into overlapping offerings. It's worse in big corporate, and especially financial settings as only certain flavors of certain services will get the cyber/infosec blessing. Then you have vendor products you want to use in AWS which only support certain flavors of those same service types as well. So we end up having to bang heads against walls to actually get internal cyber&external vendor onto same page. If the product touches several service types (containers/storage/database/etc) then you have to make sure they can all be strung together in an approved compatible fashion. In the old days a vendor could say they support x86 Linux, and you knew you'd more likely than not be able to install their software. Now you have to go many layers deeper than "we support AWS" to understand if its actually going to work or not, sometimes with multi-week POCs.
abawany 4y ago
I have experience with Google Cloud and AWS is overwhelming for me: it is like going to a buffet with 80 varieties of crab rangoons or something - it was really tough to make a choice. I was just trying to enable alerts on a container-hosted service and it took me quite a bit to get there and even then the result is not very nice. Probably my inexperience though.

pwarner 4y ago

Yeah the tiered pricing makes Azure super complex. Azure App Services is crazy. The problem there is there are technical differences too, so it's very hard to sort out what you need. Storage is more complex too. While AWS has lots of challenges from those 700 teams, each services is simpler.

Melatonic 4y ago
Sounds like all microsoft licensing. Its ridiculously complicated and even the dedicated people hired to handle JUST that for you will often be confused or not up to date.
- tanseydavid 4y ago
  In almost 30 years of dealing professionally with MS I have never once been able to get an answer to any licensing question, without the MS rep needing to consulting with others and get back to me. The licensing is complex by intention.
  - Melatonic 4y ago
    Yea they want to confuse you so you buy more stuff! The good reps I have seen make their own matrix or spreadsheets you can go through to see products. Often though I have discovered random smaller and cheaper product lines that save us a ton of money.

202206241203 4y ago

> AWS feels like 700 two pizza teams designing a cloud all in their own black boxes. And Linux (or whatever is even more convoluted) developers forced to do UX.

timcavel 4y ago