Who Wins the Battle of Cloud: AWS or Azure?

Before we move to the battleground, we need to have a clear understanding that Microsoft Azure and AWS both are giants in cloud space. With their unique products and offers, they are touching the lives of millions.

They both are superheroes in their world; however, in the cloud battle, let us find out who wins this battle.

If we look at the current market expansion, we will start believing that AWS has a modern edge over Microsoft Azure. However, a deeper look will give us a different picture. To find out which cloud service provider is the best in the market, one should consider various factors – cloud storage offerings, pricing, data transfer loss rate, and others.

Who says superheroes are fictional characters? Cloud computing is acting like a superhero helping millions of people across the globe.

AWS was first introduced in the year 2002. The first competitor arrived in 2009, Google Cloud. However, Microsoft did not enter the cloud market till 2010.

When Azure first introduced, it faced many challenges before start getting accepted by the customers. AWS had been continuously serving the market for more than seven years when Azure launched, resultantly it built robust infrastructure, a wide range of services, and capital compared to Azure. It was a complete setback for Microsoft Azure, which was scrambling to capture the cloud market.

Learning and Innovation

It is well said that learning from mistakes and innovation can build a successful brand. Microsoft quickly learned from its failure and revamped its cloud products and services, adding a wide variety of operating system and programming language. That made their offerings more scalable and compatible with Linux.

Today, Azure is giving a tough competition to AWS in the cloud service market.

AWS is the leading cloud solutions provider that keeps on adding innovative features to make its offerings more customer-centric. Here are some prominent organizations using AWS: Netflix, Expedia, Hulu, Spotify, and Ubisoft.

Both leading solutions providers are contributing to the welfare of society in their way.

For example, NASA used the AWS platform to store vast files of videos and pictures to make it available to all personnel from one centralized location

For Example, the Microsoft Azure IoT suite is used to develop Weka Smart Fridge to store the vaccinations properly. It helps most of the nonprofit medical organizations to make these vaccinations available to the people.

Who Holds What?

Undoubtedly, they both are leading players of cloud service provider fraternity. While Azure holds 29.4% installed applications workloads, AWS holds 41.5 % market share.

In 2017, AWS’ revenue was $3.66 billion with a 47.1 % growth, while Azure clocked a revenue of $6.9 billion (Azure and Office365) with only a 10% rise. Microsoft’s Azure cloud division includes both Azure and Office365. In recent years, Microsoft Azure scored good growth in revenue vis-à-vis AWS.

As of now, AWS holds a strong position compared to Azure. However, Azure is adding more scalable features to its services, making it more applicable for the customers. They both are reliable and adaptable, helping society in various forms. No one ever thought that Azure could catch up, but Azure proved the naysayers wrong. The debate about who is stronger in the competition continues, but one thing is sure that Cloud is here to stay.

The winner of the battle is for sure the customer as two leading technology innovators continuously up their antennas.