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Microsoft Azure vs. Amazon Web Services, For Programmers
Nerval's Lobster writes "Tech writer and programmer Jeff Cogswell does a head-to-head comparison of Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services from a pure programming perspective, examining the respective sides' vendor lock-in and vendor-specific APIs (among other issues). 'If you're not using any vendor-specific APIs, then it's safe to say the experience you get on either Amazon or Microsoft will be roughly the same,' he writes. 'But that means you're also not developing an app that necessarily takes advantage of all possible cloud capabilities—not just add-ons, but scalability. Your app might need to expand and grow as your user base grows.' He suggests it's ultimately a tie between the two companies. 'From a strict programming perspective, both companies have their own RESTful API, and their own libraries for using the API.'"
The problem with both of these services, though, that RMS could have told you about: "The moment you start using either, you're locked in for the most part."
Please google "Cloud Abstraction Layer".
Here; I'll help you out:
https://www.google.com/search?q=cloud+abstraction+layer
I wonder why Cogswell ignored Google's cloud services. They've got the Python- or Java-based AppEngine, and they've got a full virtual server service. There are a lot of other platforms, too, but as far as size and industry impact, I'd put Google on a similar level.
Funny, though, that out of the three of them, if I were to choose the least "evil" one, it'd be Microsoft.
Last, but not least, if you're using Azure, I'm pretty sure that New Relic has an agent that's compatible, for performance monitoring.
The CB App. What's your 20?
If you have to ask the question, you've already lost.
I've got an azure account with MSDN and TechNET subscription (I don't remember which of the two came with the azure). Processor time on their service is very expensive if you go beyond the allotment of free time given to you by those subs. The service works well, although getting your code to the servers is a little kludgy. Given the high cost, I think you'd be hard pressed to find value when weighed against leasing a full server or even multiple servers from a regular hosting provider. The exception to that would be if you had a simply massive load requirement and just couldn't muster enough horsepower out of a few traditional servers.
For what I would am doing, the cost is unreasonable. I've never really looked at amazon; so I can't compare them.
Briefer summary of linked article:
Amazon and Azure use different API's, if you use one vendor's API, you're locked into that vendor. There might be libraries available that hide the vendor specific API's but that's outside the scope of the article.
You're never forced into using AWS APIs. They are there if you want to use them. If you don't want to use S3, you stand up a storage server as an instance. No vendor lock-in. If you don't want to use RDS, you build your own DB instance. No vendor lock-in. If you don't want to use ELB, you build your own load balancer instances. AWS offers shortcuts for those developers who want big features and don't want to build them. It doesn't force them on you.
All That Cloud: Amazon, Google App Engine, Windows Azure, Heroku, Jelastic
As if your ISP or colo wouldn't give you the boot "any time they have a problem with you" either. LOL
use Skytap! So Much Better ;)
Really? You're hung-up on that little point? Your domain name could be seized by ICE and who knows what else, and you're concerned that the Amazon caved to pressure to pull Wikileaks? This kind of thing has been going on for a long time before Wikileaks and Amazon. It's apart of the risk of doing business in this world. There is no way around it.
I'm also not so convinced that the VM cost is that way out of line. The performance we get, both in and outbound, is high, and we pay considerably less than we used to for our hosting. I guess you have to compare like with like taking into account bandwidth, scalability and SLA, and the flexibility to dial cost up and down as the machines are scaled, which you do not have with a true hosted server and database.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
It's worth noting that rackspace's cloud system is pretty slick and easy to use now as well. Nowhere near as big as those two monsters, but it's a very well done system that is very easy to use, and pretty cheap on top of it.
Amazon will sell you the lube.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The article seems to bemoan the lack of standards and APIs for relatively new technologies like blob storage, message queuing and the like.
In short, it's the same situtation everyone deals with when choosing a platform. Take full advantage of the specific platform and lose portablity, or code to a portable subset and tradeoff ease of implementation for platform independence.
You can minimize your dependency on a third-party API if you use an API of your own to code against. Creating a set of interfaces that provide the blob, queuing and other cloud features for your project not only isolates the cloud-specifc code to one place, but it makes it more testable (using test-doubles, fakes, etc).
This is a problem, but it is a well understood one with a time tested solution.
Of course, TFA acknowledges that there are several (both public cloud and open-source software for private-cloud implementations) alternatives that support Amazon APIs, but dismisses them as unlikely to actually work with real apps no substantive reasoning presented.
It really looks like the author had a conclusion in mind before even beginning to look at the facts.
I've used both cloud platforms for the past few years and I really enjoy both of them. I do think that in the past few months the Azure tools have gotten a lot better and easier to use.
I like Azure for the SQL (as somebody else mentioned) but my biggest beef with them is no ability to talk to the hardware. We are doing some CUDA development, and with Amazon I have the ability to talk direct to the hardware in a VM... not so with Azure. It's a niche need but something I'd like to see.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.