New Microsoft Resource Compares Azure and AWS Cloud Services at a Glance

Microsoft wants to make it easy for developers to be able to compare its cloud services to those available on Amazon Web Services (AWS), launching a cloud service map on Monday that allows users to see equivalent services across the two hyperscale cloud platforms at a glance.

Michael Crump, technical product manager for Azure, said that the cloud service map allows users to “quickly orient” themselves with “the services required for a successful migration.” While it may be more accurate to refer to the map as a table, it does offer a straightforward comparison of Azure and AWS services, which can come in handy if you are overwhelmed by the number of cloud services available.

The cloud service map covers 13 different categories featuring different services across compute, storage, database, intelligence, Internet of Things, and more. It shows the AWS service and Azure service, as well as a description of what the service does. While all of this information is publicly available, the format makes it an extremely useful resource for IT teams who may use services across both cloud providers.

“As the leading public cloud platforms, Azure and AWS each offer businesses a broad and deep set of capabilities with global coverage,” Microsoft said. “Yet many organizations choose to use both platforms together for greater choice and flexibility, as well as to spread their risk and dependencies with a multicloud approach. Consulting companies and software vendors might also build on and use both Azure and AWS, as these platforms represent most of the cloud market demand.”

While AWS is still the leader in the public cloud market by a longshot, according to Gartner’s latest numbers, Microsoft had 7.1 percent market share in 2016, followed by Alibaba and Google.