Key Differences between Azure and EC2

At the time of application design decision on Cloud , most of us get into this discussion at some point of time, “The Key differences between Windows Azure and Amazon EC2.

I thought of listing down the key differences of the both.Following comparison might be helpful.

Basic

Azure can be classified as Platform as a Service (PaaS): a cloud model that offers hardware, operating systems and application-support, effectively offering a virtual server on which to load software, which can be accessed and managed through a Web browser.

 Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications.Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows  to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. 

Application Support

Amazon EC2 running Microsoft Windows Server® (available in 2003 R2, 2008 or 2008 R2 editions) is a fast and dependable environment for deploying applications using the Microsoft Web Platform, including ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight™, and Internet Information Server (IIS). Amazon EC2 enables you to run any compatible Windows-based solution on AWS’ high-performance, reliable, cost-effective, cloud computing platform. 

Microsoft Azure on the other hand is purely a Windows environment with Windows Server 2008 the primary environment and all languages/applications that are available on Windows Server is supported. It supports other languages like Java, PHP and Ruby to run on Azure.

Scalability

By using Windows Azure, we can quickly scale up to handle the heavy computational and storage needs it has for its online video platform. Whereas scaling up with Amazon EC2 required the company to add more virtual servers and manage its own scaling logic.

Pricing

 Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Azure require no up-front expenses, no long term commitment, and enable you to pay only for the resources you use.

Deployment/Setup Complexity

Setup for Amazon EC2 involves setting up an image and configuring a virtual instance of the instance to include the Operating System/Application. The setup and deployment activities are similar in nature to setup a virtualized environment. Amazon provides command line tools which would help support this.Azure provides an integrated approach of deployment directly from Visual Studio which would directly allow you to deploy the solution on Azure.