ThinkVirt

Now that Microsoft has finally announced pricing for the Azure platform, I thought I would take a look at comparing the pricing model against the most popular and mature cloud on the market to date, Amazon Web Services (AWS). My initial reaction is that Microsoft took Amazon’s price structure and met their cost point, or shaved off half a cent.

Acronyms

AWS = Amazon Web Services
AMI = Amazon Machine Image

Legend

When there is a clear winner on price (fixed price for both platforms), the cheapest option will be denoted via green highlighting.
On many of the pricing models, especially relating to bandwidth, AWS offers a sliding scale. Use more, pay less (to a point). In these scenarios, the information will be presented in the notes field, but there will not be a clearly marked winner.

Basic Computing

Of note here, Azure can ONLY run Windows-based instances, at the moment. AWS is able to run Linux instances, which are cheaper than Windows instances ($0.10/hour for a small Linux instance).

Database Operations

This is an area that is quite gray to me. Microsoft is offering SQL Azure which appears to be cheaper than even SimpleDB from AWS. It’s not quite clear whether you are getting a full instance in SQL Azure, or simply a database.

AWS does offer SimpleDB, which is explained as, “Amazon SimpleDB provides a simple web services interface to create and store multiple data sets, query your data easily, and return the results. Your data is automatically indexed, making it easy to quickly find the information that you need. There is no need to pre-define a schema or change a schema if new data is added later. And scale-out is as simple as creating new domains, rather than building out new servers.”

Below you will see time multiplied out for AWS with an instance running 24 hours, 365 days a year. You will also see pricing with an instance on 10 hours a day, 20 days a month (work week). By leveraging the persistent storage of S3, an instance does not need to be online 24 hours a day, assuming a cloud-ready solution is architected.

Message Queueing

AWS’ Simple Queue Service (SQS) defines themselves as, “Amazon SQS works by exposing Amazon’s web-scale messaging infrastructure as a web service. Any computer on the Internet can add or read messages without any installed software or special firewall configurations. Components of applications using Amazon SQS can run independently, and do not need to be on the same network, developed with the same technologies, or running at the same time.”

Advanced Features

There are several features not yet available on the Azure platform. Most of these features revolve around global deployments, such as CloudFront, which is a webservice for global cloud delivery.

This is simply a pricing comparison of each platform. A functional and performance test is coming as soon as I get a full blown Azure account, which should be in the next week or so.