
Ask HN: Why is AWS better than Azure (or vice versa)? - chupa-chups
My own opinion is skewed due to some funny and not-so-funny experiences with Azure Germany (which claimed to be GDPR compliant but has since Oct &#x27;18 been discontinued, forcing us to migrate).<p>I am interested in your opinion regarding why (and how) Azure or AWS is more suited to your demands than the other.
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bradknowles
IMO, it depends on what you want and what you need.

Azure is likely to be a good environment for you, if you use Windows
exclusively or primarily. It’s the native cloud platform from Microsoft, after
all. You can certainly do Windows on AWS, but Microsoft will always treat AWS
the same way they did Lotus 1-2-3, back in the day.

AWS has lots and lots of services that they make available to you, and lots of
certifications to help your people be able to make sense of them all. But
there can be a lot of overlap with some of those services, and some of them
may not be as well supported as others. AWS is the king of taking open source
software and adding features to it and injecting a lot of cloud-scale
capabilities that even the original authors could never have dreamed of.

Google has a long history of building internal technology for themselves, and
then publishing papers on stuff they were doing ten years ago, and which has
already been completely superseded internally. They’re also the king of
launching new features or buying startup companies and then unceremoniously
killing them shortly thereafter.

If you are a business, you can get differing levels of support contracts with
all the major cloud providers, and some may be a better fit for you
financially than others, depending on your particular circumstances.

For me, the de-facto standard cloud provider is AWS. They’re the 8000lb
gorilla in the room. But AWS has been around the longest and they’re the most
long-term stable cloud provider, whereas they might not be the fastest to
adopt technologies like Kubernetes which they did not invent themselves.

The question you should ask yourself is whether or not you want to be building
your business on top of that foundation, or if you want to work with someone
else.

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verdverm
I actually like GCP best. Least buggy and most DevOps out of the box. (In
example, managing developer access and login keys is so so much better,
automatic VM migration on hardware failure)

The right cloud also depends on your business. If trying to break into Fortune
500 enterprise software, Azure or IBM Clouds and partner programs is a good
way to go.

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kerng
GCP has a pretty bad reputation for shutting down accounts arbitrarily- there
have been quite the horror stories from smaller companies.

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verdverm
I don't think there is much a reputation for killing accounts. Non-hn readers
have no idea of the few isolated events that have been posted here. Most of
these have to do with free tier.

I've moved more than a dozen accounts to GCloud with no billing or removal
issues. It only seems to be recent, not ongoing over 6 years.

K8s is the best there too

~~~
kerng
It's just a risk the business owner should be aware of, best is to make sure
you have a dedicated account manager.

~~~
verdverm
The risk of being effected by hardware failure in AWS is greater than the risk
of account closing in GCP. Readers beware of the relative risk ratio.

BTW, GCP automatically handles VM migration on hardware events, while AWS does
not.

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smt88
Azure is less buggy, has better docs, has fewer confusingly overlapping
services, and has a better UI. YMMV.

