What is the difference between Windows Azure and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud?

Question

What is the difference between Windows Azure and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud?

Should I go with Azure or EC2?

Answer 1

Windows Azure is a service that falls in the market category "PaaS" (Platform as a Service) of the Cloud Computing market.

Windows Azure still falls somewhat "in between" the IaaS category and the PaaS category (with regards to another service categorized in this e.g. Google AppEngine).

Amazon Cloud Computing: I do not understand what you mean by this. Are you referring to the whole service offering of Amazon? a product of Amazon in the Cloud Computing category?

Updated: For more information, please consult a similar question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1830142/what-is-cloud-computing

Answer 2

Had to do more research and correct previous response. They both support application and databases in a cloud. Amazon is also offering the ability to run Windows Server and SQL Server. Microsoft offers SQL Server in the form of SQL Azure.

Amazon has a different pricing structure between Linux and Windows. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ I couldn't find any difference with Microsoft Pricing

Answer 3

Azure is a service that allows you to upload an application - the cloud system will then run it on an arbitrary number of physical machines in order to provide reliability and capacity. This is done largely transparently to your code. Billing is done on the basis of number of requests/data transfered/etc.

Amazon EC2 is a service that allows you to rent one or more virtual machines running Linux/Windows or some other operating system on a per hour basis. Any reliability and scaling to multiple machines you will have to code into your application yourself.