AWS vs. Azure

Amazon Web Services vs. and Windows Azure

Rob Gillenrob.gillenfamily.net@argodev

2 Managed by UT-Battellefor the U.S. Department of Energy Business Sensitive


Agenda

• What do you want to know/discuss?

• Market Overview

• Discussion of cloud primitives

• Vendor-specific Lessons-Learned

• Guestbook – a side-by-side code comparison


Types of Clouds

Private(On-Premise)

Infrastructure

(as a Service)

Platform(as a

Service)

Storage

Server HW

Networking

Servers

Databases

Virtualization

Runtimes

Applications

Security & Integration

Storage

Server HW

Networking

Servers

Databases

Virtualization

Runtimes

Applications


Storage

Server HW

Networking

Servers

Databases

Virtualization

Runtimes

Applications


You m

anage Managed b

y v

endor

Managed b

y v

endor

You m

anage

You m

anage


Types of Clouds

Private(On-Premise)

Infrastructure

(as a Service)

Platform(as a

Service)


Where They Fit

• Two Years Ago

• Now

• Two Years from Now ???

Infrastructure As A Service Platform As A Service

Amazon Web Services Microsoft Windows Azure

Amazon Web Services

Microsoft Windows Azure

Amazon Web Services

Microsoft Windows Azure

Compute As A Service


AWS Stack

• Elastic Compute Cloud

• Elastic Map Reduce

• Auto Scaling

• Cloud Front

• SimpleDB

• Relational Database Service

• Simple Storage Svc

• Elastic Block Storage

• Simple Email Service

• Simple Queue Service

• Simple Notification Service

• CloudWatch

• Virtual Private Cloud

• Elastic Load Balancing

• Import/Export

• Cloud Formation

• Elastic BeanStalk

• GovCloud


Windows Azure Stack

Compute

Storage

Data SQL Azure Data Sync

Connectivity

Azure Connect

Security “Geneva”

Application Services

Frameworks

“Dublin” “Velocity”

Service Bus

Access Control

Table Storage

Blob Storage

Queue DriveContent Delivery Network


Storage

Amazon Web Services• S3

– Buckets

• EBS

• SDB– domains

– Easy to use

• SQS

• CloudFront

• AWS Import/Export

Windows Azure• Blob Storage

– Containers

• Azure Drive

• Table Storage– Tables

– More painful than it should be

• Queues

• CDN

• Storage Stats


Databases

Amazon Web Services• MySQL

• Oracle

• Multi-AZ Mode

Windows Azure• MS SQL

• SQL Sync


Compute

Amazon Web Services• Raw VM Access

• EBS/S3-based Booting

• Specialized Nodes (CCI, CCI+GPU)

• Elastic Map Reduce

Windows Azure• Black-Box access (Worker

Role/Web Role)

• VM Role is non-persistent


Networking

Amazon Web Services• IP / Elastic IP / ELB

• Virtual Private Cloud

• Route 53

• ELB

• Firewall heavily configurable

Windows Azure• Automatic IP

assignment/Load-balancing – No Static IPs available

• Azure Connect

• Built-in Load Balancing

• Endpoints defined in csdef/cscfg


Deployment

Amazon Web Services• Amazon Machine Instance

(AMI)

• Traditional Deployment Models

• Fine-grained updates

• More Responsibility

• Less magic

• Elastic Beanstalk

• Cloud Formation

Windows Azure• Cspkg (fancy zip file)

• Upload via portal or API via blob storage

• Course-grained updates

• “click to scale”

• More magic


Middleware

Amazon Web Services• Simple Notification Services

• CloudWatch/AutoScale ??

• Simple Email Services

Windows Azure• Service Bus

• Caching

• Access Control


Tooling

Amazon Web Services• Command line

• REST-API

• Web Portal

• Numerous 3rd Party Tools

• No local dev/test

Windows Azure• Web Portal

• Rest API

• Visual Studio Extensions

• Numerous 3rd Party Tools

• Dev Fabric (great for compute, OK for storage)



What Happened

• Incorrect Network Change == Replication Storm for EC2

• “Affected Availability Zone”

• Actually affected *multiple* AZs (initially)• "Each availability zone runs on its own physically distinct, independent

infrastructure, and is engineered to be highly reliable. Common points of failures like generators and cooling equipment are not shared across Availability Zones. Additionally, they are physically separate, such that even extremely uncommon disasters such as fires, tornados or flooding would only affect a single Availability Zone." http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_isolated_are_Availability_Zones_from_one_another

• Amazon had a “cloud burst”

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_isolated_are_Availability_Zones_from_one_another

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_isolated_are_Availability_Zones_from_one_another


Oh No! The Cloud Can’t be Trusted!!!

• Is your data center any better?

• How would YOU recover from this type of issue

• Do you regularly TEST your HA/Recovery plans.

• What would it cost you to independently provide the same level of redundancy/fault-tolerance as current cloud providers offer?– How do you cost-justify that compared to current cloud

offerings?



Fault Tolerance

AWS• Regions

• Availability Zones

• Elastic Load Balancing

• RDS in Multi-AZ mode

• S3/SDB/SQS

Azure• Multiple Instances

• Regions

• Global Traffic Manager

• SQL Azure Sync

• Blobs/Tables/Queues


Design Tenants

• Use independent components

• Design everything as a black box

• Load balance and scale clusters

• Think about graceful degradation

• Use queues to isolate components

ApplicationExamples


Computer Forensics


Document Clustering – Dynamic Scaling

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Document Clustering – Dynamic Scaling

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Document Clustering – Fault Tolerance

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Guest Book Example

Blob Store

Queue

No-SQL Store

Web Site

Background Image Processing Service

1. User Written to Table

2. Full-Res image written to blob store

3. Generate Thumbnail task stored

4. Background service receives task

5. Full-Size image retrieved from storage

6. Thumbnail generated and written to storage

7. No-SQL Store is updated with path to thumbnail

Questions?

Rob Gillen

http://rob.gillenfamily.net

@argodev

Free Access:

http://bit.ly/AzureTrial

http://aws.amazon.com/free/

http://bit.ly/AzureTrial



Technology

AWS vs. Azure