There are 2 classes of services on AWS: infrastructure and platform. It's important not to confuse them. Infrastructure includes EC2, S3, ELB, and things of that nature. Platform includes Beanstalk, Dynamo, EMR, and things of that nature.
In general, Amazon's infrastructure offerings are explicitly trying to be commodity, and compete as such. E.g. lower cost, minimal lock in. If you configure servers using chef or other configuration system, and if you wrap all your service calls, it's not challenging to move between vendors on the infrastructure level. Check out fog which helps you do just this: https://github.com/fog/fog
Amazon's platform offerings are pretty explicitly trying to build lock in -- explicit in that they're often free (Beanstalk) and really just trying to sell more infrastructure.
Microsoft, and specifically Windows, pursue a platform strategy. Them offering Linux is actually very novel for them, but it's still called WINDOWS Azure, and the word "Windows" has traditionally been synonymous with platform lock in. You write a program for Windows, it runs only on Windows, and you have to pay for Windows.
I'm excited for MS to get fully into the infrastructure business, but I see their offerings as reactionary to Amazon. Big corporate, windows-based companies are needing to do things in the cloud, and have been going to Amazon. I see Microsoft as trying to offer services to prevent them from leaving by letting them buy what they need from MS.
It's hard for me to imagine good reasons to actually start on Azure, though. They're not a price leader (dropping prices always seems reactionary to AWS price drops), they have limited selection of services (vs. AWS), limited people using them (weaker community support), and always seem clueless about the internet (SSL cert outage, anyone?). Unless you're a Windows only developer and can't work on Linux, I really don't know why I would choose them.
PS. Amazon has a startup program you can get in to. When we started on AWS, they gave us $10K in free services. I know $1K is pretty standard, but if you can get validation (investor? incubator?), they'll go higher.
In general, Amazon's infrastructure offerings are explicitly trying to be commodity, and compete as such. E.g. lower cost, minimal lock in. If you configure servers using chef or other configuration system, and if you wrap all your service calls, it's not challenging to move between vendors on the infrastructure level. Check out fog which helps you do just this: https://github.com/fog/fog
Amazon's platform offerings are pretty explicitly trying to build lock in -- explicit in that they're often free (Beanstalk) and really just trying to sell more infrastructure.
Microsoft, and specifically Windows, pursue a platform strategy. Them offering Linux is actually very novel for them, but it's still called WINDOWS Azure, and the word "Windows" has traditionally been synonymous with platform lock in. You write a program for Windows, it runs only on Windows, and you have to pay for Windows.
I'm excited for MS to get fully into the infrastructure business, but I see their offerings as reactionary to Amazon. Big corporate, windows-based companies are needing to do things in the cloud, and have been going to Amazon. I see Microsoft as trying to offer services to prevent them from leaving by letting them buy what they need from MS.
It's hard for me to imagine good reasons to actually start on Azure, though. They're not a price leader (dropping prices always seems reactionary to AWS price drops), they have limited selection of services (vs. AWS), limited people using them (weaker community support), and always seem clueless about the internet (SSL cert outage, anyone?). Unless you're a Windows only developer and can't work on Linux, I really don't know why I would choose them.
PS. Amazon has a startup program you can get in to. When we started on AWS, they gave us $10K in free services. I know $1K is pretty standard, but if you can get validation (investor? incubator?), they'll go higher.