A Tale of Two Clouds

A Tale of Two Clouds

My bill for Azure and AWS has started to creep up, so I did a bit of hunt the services and try to trample them. For AWS, it was all fine, and, in fact, AWS makes it easy to know exactly where your costs are. But for Azure, I just kept clicking on fancy pie charts, and which told me nothing. With AWS, I was always just a click away from showing it all in plain English and where there were so many useful on-line resources for explaining the costs, but where Azure just kept throwing charts in my way. I often, too, had to re-login to the Azure system.

And in Azure, you consistently see those three moving dots ‘…’ where it is processing something, and which never appear in AWS. Perhaps it goes to show that there’s a whole lot of different background services that have to kick-in, that AWS has just integrated into one consistent platform?

I am so sorry Microsoft, but compared to AWS, the Azure infrastructure is just a sensory/jargon overload experience, where it is difficult to know where you are, what you doing, and how much the whole thing costs. Azure just wants to push everything it can to the user, and where very little is obvious. It needs the eye of Steve Jobs, to identify what is important, and how to create a consistent interface.

I really think Microsoft has scaled their Windows environment into the Cloud, and have forgotten that most people just want a big button that says “Create Instance”, rather than:

And in AWS, I just get a consistent user interface, and where all the things I don’t really want are pushed away to the side. Compared with Azure, AWS is the perfect Cloud environment - it is simple and where the user can see everything that they need. Every service comes with the same obvious interface, and where everything is up-front and always focused on creating a dashboard which is useful. All of the additional things that AWS might want to sell to the user are kept away, and their costings seem to forever push the user to reduce costs and not hide anything.

The whole EC2 infrastructure just seems so obvious for performance, costs and how it is maintained. I have an instance type, a volume, a security group (for my firewalling), and some snapshots. If I create a snapshot rather than have a volume, I’ll half my costs. AWS is almost forcing me to reduce costs, as I know I can easily recover my snapshot back to a volume.

And most of the time, the costs are easy to compute in your head. For 500GB of volume space, it costs $50 a month, and for a snapshot of this, it’s $25 per month. For compute, I know if I move from one instance to the next one up, I double my costs. But I know that it’s the volumes that are costing the most, so I can ramp up the instance type while I cope with demand. For EC2, the dashboard is all obvious, and all-front:

I can easily set alarms and messaging alerts and then can even set up automated reboots on certain conditions. And, I must say, the Lamdba services and the integration into S3 is a dream to use, and if anyone was looking for a reason to learn Python, it is here. The days of networking engineers learning Python are truly here.

With Azure, we have many different and disparate services being brought together, and — as far as I can see — no-one has really looked at integrating them properly. If you run a big Azure Cloud, it is probably fine, and you are likely to have a lovely dashboard to take you to where you want to be. But, if you just want to run a few Cloud services, it is just too confusing.

My EC2 console works like a dream, and when it comes to billing, it’s all there in plain and simple terms:

So when my bill comes through from AWS, I understand it, but that’s not the case for Azure, and where your head starts to spin to know where to find out where that $50 per month hit is coming from. With AWS you get one beautifully designed interface where you only get what you need, and it’s obvious where things are. It’s a quick open of the console, and type in your service, and you’re away:

But Azure gives you an ever-changing interface, and where you get everything you might want, pushed to you. Because of this overload, it’s slow to load, and where you easily get lost in what you are trying to find:

When I click on Virtual Machines, it logs me out, and takes me here:

And my login has gone again:

And please don’t ask me about Microsoft login identities for Azure, it is so confusing, and I often have to re-login several times on my journey, especially as I have my own personal ID and a university ID. Microsoft often gets confused between them.

And dare I say it, but AWS is actually quite fun to use, and where I can install onto my iPad/phone, and where the user interface has been designed to give me what I need. The security groups in AWS, too, are just so easy to set up and work like a dream. For adding new hosts for RDP access, it’s a simple access to the security group on the instance, and you’re away. And, for setting up simple databases, my days of SQL and Access are finished, and where DynamoDB is just so simple to code with.

Conclusions

Like Amazon and Apple, Microsoft needs to invest in getting its dashboards to work, and try and integrate things into a common platform. It might just be me, but I would go for AWS every time. As someone who has developed code within Microsoft systems for so long, it was not an obvious step, but AWS just wipes the floor with Azure in terms of usability and integration with the Web.

For a large company, there are probably many decisions that have to be made on choosing the right Cloud environment, and especially the integration into Active Directory, but for small businesses, there’s no real competition, AWS wins hands-down in most cases. Well, here my AWS site running:

Apart from EC2 for my main Web instance, I run WorkMail for the mail integration, Lambda for processing requests, Route53 for my DNS, and DynamoDB for a NoSQL database. I moved from a four core 1&1 bare metal server with 16GB to a 2 vCPU instance, and it’s so much cheaper and better performing, and give me the world of the Cloud at my fingertips.

Now, I’m away to see if I can find out where Azure is draining my bank account.