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Curriculum/DevOps and Infrastructure/Cloud Platforms — Microsoft Azure/Azure vs AWS
35 minBeginner

Azure vs AWS

After this lesson, you will be able to: Compare Azure to AWS, understand why enterprises pick Azure, and learn how Azure pricing works.

Azure is the #2 cloud and the dominant choice in Microsoft-heavy enterprises. Knowing it doubles your job-market reach.

This is a free introductory lesson. No purchase required.

Azure vs AWS, in one paragraph

Same shape, different names. Azure has VMs (= EC2), Blob Storage (= S3), Azure SQL DB (= RDS), Functions (= Lambda), Entra ID (= IAM SSO + more), App Service (= App Runner / Elastic Beanstalk). Different strengths: Azure's identity story (Entra ID) is the best in cloud and is used by enterprises EVEN IF they run mostly on AWS. Microsoft-heavy ecosystems (Office 365, Active Directory, Visual Studio) integrate natively. AWS doesn't compete on this. Pricing roughly comparable; specific services price differently. Migration cost between clouds is enormous; pick the one your industry uses.

Why enterprises pick Azure

Existing Microsoft license deals (Office 365, Windows Server, SQL Server) often include Azure credits. Entra ID integration: workforce identity already lives there. No new identity stack needed. Hybrid cloud: Azure Arc + Azure Stack make on-prem + cloud feel uniform. Government / regulated industries: Azure has the largest government cloud footprint (Azure Government). Tooling: Visual Studio + Azure DevOps + GitHub (Microsoft owns both) is a tightly-integrated stack.

How Azure pricing works

Pay-as-you-go: hourly billing per resource. Reserved instances: 1- or 3-year commitments for big discounts (30-50%). Spot VMs: same as AWS spot, cheap but evictable. Free Tier: 12 months of select services + always-free quotas + $200 credit for first month. Cost-optimisation: 'Azure Cost Management' is the dashboard. Set budgets + alerts (parallel to AWS Budgets). Tag resources from day one; reports become useful only with tags.

💡 Resource groups: Azure's organizing primitive

AWS has no real equivalent to Azure resource groups. A resource group is a logical container for resources (VMs, DBs, networks) that share a lifecycle. Delete a resource group → everything in it deletes. Convenient for env teardown. Tag resource groups for cost reports + access control. Always group by env (rg-prod, rg-staging) + workload.

Sign up for Azure free tier

Same shape as AWS signup; $200 credit for the first 30 days.

  1. 1

    Go to azure.microsoft.com/free; sign up (need a credit card)

  2. 2

    Install Azure CLI: brew install azure-cli (or download for your OS)

  3. 3

    az login # opens browser to authenticate

  4. 4

    az account show # confirms subscription

  5. 5

    Set a budget: portal > Cost Management > Budgets > $5 / $20 / $50

  6. 6

    Create a resource group: az group create -n rg-learning -l eastus

  7. 7

    Learn the convention: az <resource> <verb> --resource-group <name>

Quick Check

Which Azure feature has no direct equivalent in AWS?

Pick the unique-to-Azure construct.

Back to Cloud Platforms — Microsoft Azure
Azure Core Services→