Amazon Web Services vs Microsoft Azure service comparison cheat sheet

27th of April, 2015 / / 6 Comments

Originally posted on Lucian’s blog at lucian.blog.

I’m a big fan of both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. The two clouds are redefining the way web, apps and everything on the internet is made accessible from enterprise to the average user. Both for my own benefit and for yours, here’s a detailed side by side comparison of services as well as features available in each cloud:

Cloud Service Microsoft Azure Amazon Web Services
Locations Azure Regions Global Infrastructure
  NA Availability Zones
Management Azure Portal Management Console
Azure Preview Portal NA
Powershell+Desired State Configuration Command Line Interface
Compute Services
 Cloud Services Elastic Beanstalk
Virtual Machines Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
  Batch Auto Scaling
RemoteApp Work Spaces
Web and Mobile Web Apps NA

Mobile Services Mobile SDK
API Management CloudTrail
NA Cognito
NA Mobile Analytics
Storage
 SQL Databases Relational Database Service (RDS)
DocumentDB Dynamo DB
  Redis Cache Redshift
Blob Storage Simple Storage Service (S3)
Table Storage Elastic Block Store (EBS)
Queues Simple Queue Service (SQS)
File Storage Elastic File System (EFS)
Storsimple Storage Gateway
Analytics + Big Data
 HDInsight (Hadoop) Elastic MapReduce (EMR)
Stream Analytics Kinesis
Machine Learning Machine Learning
Data Orchestration Data Factory Data Pipeline
Media Services
 Media Services Elastic Transcoder
  Visual Studio Online NA
  BizTalk Services Simple Email Service (SES)
  Backup (Recovery Services) Glacier
  CDN CloudFront
Automation Automation OpsWorks
  Scheduler CodeDeploy + CodePipeline
Service Bus Simple Workflow (SWF)
Search CloudSearch
Networking Virtual Network Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
  ExpressRoute DirectConnect
  Traffic Manager Elastic Load Balancing
  NA Route 53 (DNS)
 Management Services Resource Manager Cloud Formation
NA Trusted Adviser
Identity and Access Management
 Active Directory Directory Service
NA Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Marketplace Marketplace Marketplace
Container Support Docker VM Extensions EC2 Container Service
Compliance Trust Centre CloudHSM
Multi-factor Authentication Multi-Factor Authentication Multi-Factor Authentication
Monitoring Services Operational Insights Config
Application Insights CloudWatch
Event Hubs NA
Notification Hubs Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Key Vault Key Management Store
Government Government GovCloud
Other services Web Jobs Lambda
NA Service Catalog
Office 365 Exchange Online WorkMail
Office 365 Sharepoint Online WorkDocs

For me this comparison is an exercise to allow me to reference quickly what the major services and features are on each cloud platform.… [Keep reading] “Amazon Web Services vs Microsoft Azure service comparison cheat sheet”

Mule ESB DEV/TEST environments in Microsoft Azure

16th of February, 2015 / / No Comments

Agility in delivery of IT services is what cloud computing is all about. Week in, week out, projects on-board and wind-up, developers come and go. This places enormous stress on IT teams with limited resourcing and infrastructure capacity to provision developer and test environments. Leveraging public cloud for integration DEV/TEST environments is not without its challenges though. How do we develop our interfaces in the cloud yet retain connectivity to our on-premises line-of-business systems?

In this post I will demonstrate how we can use Microsoft Azure to run Mule ESB DEV/TEST environments using point-to-site VPNs for connectivity between on-premises DEV resources and our servers in the cloud.… [Keep reading] “Mule ESB DEV/TEST environments in Microsoft Azure”

Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 2

4th of November, 2014 / / 2 Comments

In the first post in this series we setup our scenario and looked at how we can build out an ultra highly available Azure SQL Database layer for our applications. In this second post we’ll go through setting up the MVC Web Application we want to deploy so that it can leverage the capabilities of the Azure platform.

MVC project changes

This is actually pretty straight forward – you can take the sample MVC project from Codeplex and apply these changes easily.… [Keep reading] “Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 2”

Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 1

3rd of November, 2014 / / 2 Comments

As public cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure mature it is becoming easier to build deployment architectures that are substantially resilient to faults in cloud platforms that are increasingly unlikely to ever eventuate due to the previously mentioned maturity!

We’ll take a look at how we can deploy an ultra highly available database-backed ASP.Net MVC Website using Microsoft Azure across this post and my next one.

Desired State

The diagram below shows what we will be aiming to achieve with our setup.… [Keep reading] “Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 1”

Azure VM Security using Azure VM Security Extensions, ConfigMgr and SCM Part 2

31st of October, 2014 / / 1 Comment

This post is part of the series. Part 1 can be found here. As I mentioned on previous post, this post to wrap up my session at TechEd Sydney 2014 DCI315 Azure VM Security ad Compliance Management with Configuration Manager and SCM.

Let’s jump to our next focus:

Patch Azure VM

ConfigMgr  is long famous for its capability for patch management. Three points on how the patch management lifecycle is running with ConfigMgr 2012 R2 for our Azure VMs:

  • Scan and Measure
    Scan&Measure
  • Remediate Non-Compliant – Patch the non-compliant
  • Reporting
    reportdefinition

Patch is straight forward and utilize ADR (Automatic Deployment Rules) to set schedule update/patch.… [Keep reading] “Azure VM Security using Azure VM Security Extensions, ConfigMgr and SCM Part 2”

Reducing the size of an Azure Web Role deployment package

28th of October, 2014 / / 7 Comments

If you’ve been working with Azure Web Roles and deployed them to an Azure subscription, you likely have noticed the substantial size of a simple web role deployment package. Even with the vanilla ASP.NET sample website the deployment package seems to be quite bloated. This is not such a problem if you have decent upload bandwidth, but in Australia bandwidth is scarce like water in the desert so let’s see if we can compress this deployment package a little bit.… [Keep reading] “Reducing the size of an Azure Web Role deployment package”

Claims-Based Federation Service using Microsoft Azure

6th of June, 2014 / / 16 Comments

In this post I will discuss how you can setup Microsoft Azure to provide federation services with claims authentication in the same way that an Active Directory Federation Service (ADFS) farm would on-premises. This can be achieved with an Azure subscription, Access Control Services (ACS) and an Azure Active Directory (AAD) instance. The key benefit of using Azure SaaS is that Microsoft have taken care of all the high availability and load scaling configuration, therefor you have no need to manage multiple ADFS servers to gain the same desired functionality.… [Keep reading] “Claims-Based Federation Service using Microsoft Azure”

When Will Microsoft Drop “Windows” from the Name of Windows Intune?

18th of May, 2014 / / No Comments

It has been a pleasure to observe a truly significant change in the thinking at Microsoft.  Slowly, Microsoft is realizing that not everything is about Windows anymore.  I say this as someone who is a former employee of Microsoft.  I am a regular user of Windows.  I personally think that Windows is a terrific product and brand.  I run Windows 8.1 Update 1 on my notebook.  I also run Windows VMs.

 

But we live in a world of BYOD now. … [Keep reading] “When Will Microsoft Drop “Windows” from the Name of Windows Intune?”