Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Amazon Web Services is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers, including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.
AWS is primarily designed as a cloud computing platform, and its services are intended to be used in the cloud, which means that they might be able to be extended to on-premises environments like AWS Outposts but it would still perform the best in the cloud. Advantages of having AWS on a distributed network include flexibility, easier to use, cost-effective, reliable, secure, scalable and high performance. AWS is considered secure, but there are some security and privacy considerations to keep in mind when using this platform like the data security, data encryption, network security, etc. Lastly, an interesting fact about AWS is that by the end of 2021, AWS held 31% of the total global cloud market.
Microsoft Azure
The Azure cloud platform has more than 200 products and cloud services designed to help you bring new solutions to life, to solve today’s challenges and create the future. Build, run, and manage applications across multiple clouds, on-premises, and at the edge, with the tools and frameworks of your choice.
Microsoft Azure is also primarily designed as a cloud computing platform and it also provides solutions for on-premises like Azure Stack and Azure Arc. These on-premises solutions make it possible to use Azure technologies in a variety of environments, not limited to cloud. Some advantages of using Microsoft Azure would be its high availability, data security, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. Security concerns about Azure include access token abuse/leakage, lateral movement from compromised workloads, credentials theft, and insider threats with existing permissions. Lastly, an interesting fact about Azure is that the number of Azure users worldwide is approaching the 1 billion mark.