Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. Microsoft claims that Azure is “the cloud for modern business”. However, veteran Amazon AWS users may encounter a great deal of frustration at Azure’s immaturity.

Despite Microsoft’s assertion that its “integrated tools, pre-built templates and managed services make it easier to build and manage enterprise, mobile, Web and Internet of Things (IoT) apps faster”, experienced cloud systems engineers will immediately notice that critical features from AWS are missing.

Azure has no built-in snapshot capability

One of the best features of the AWS elastic block storage offering is the ability to take snapshots on demand. System administrators can completely avoid the need to install, manage, and maintain backup software on EC2 virtual machines. Planning a major software upgrade on a virtual machine running in AWS? No problem, take a quick snapshot first, so you can quickly revert if it goes sideways. It is possible to get this sort of functionality by writing PowerShell scripts for Azure, but doing so means incurring a significant amount of test and development time building custom code for something that Amazon AWS can do “out of the box”.

Azure has no equivalent to the AWS RDS MySQL service

AWS RDS makes life incredibly easy for MySQL system administrators. Amazon’s RDS infrastructure provides scalable, highly available and reliable MySQL instances on demand. It only takes a few clicks to set up a replicated MySQL database with automatic failover and automatic daily and weekly backups, and pricing is very reasonable. At present Azure has no equivalent of this service for MySQL. Microsoft does have somewhat similar service based on SQL Server, but pricing is naturally much higher than for MySQL-based databases. MySQL users on Azure are left with the need to build their own infrastructure, running database services in a virtual machine and setting up details like replication and backups manually.

We run services in both Azure and AWS. Each company’s offering has its own benefits and drawbacks. These are just a few of the issues we’ve encountered while working with Azure. If you would like to discuss the possibility of moving your company’s computing services to the cloud, contact the experts at Global Management Advisors today at 407-588-7039.