Hello,
So i'm currently trying to find a cloud host for a web app i'm working on. I've been looking at AWS and Azure and I really can't see which is the better option so i'm turning to HN. I'm new to cloud providers and would like to know the main differences between AWS and Azure. The price doesn't matter all I care about is performance, up-time and scale-ability.
Thanks :)<p>NOTE: If this helps my web app is coded in node.js
Start with Azure and add AWS later:<p>They have an AWS-like virtual machine offering as well as the heroku-like hosting, the service is about as reliable, and if you set up your entity now you can register for bizspark and get a ton of free service to get you off the ground.<p>Previous discussion: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5293098" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5293098</a>
Note: I've never used AWS.<p>Currently, I use Azure for my projects. Primary reasons are due to being a C# developer professionally, and it just made sense to use it. In Visual Studio, it is very easy to publish projects directly to Azure without ever actually logging into the Azure dashboard.<p>I can't comment on price comparisons, which are much different. But I'd say give Azure a try for free initially to demo it and see if it fits what you need.<p>One thing of note that I feel is not mentioned often when discussing these two options. If you are planning on using Azure's storage options, there will be a sort of "vendor-lock-in" involved with the code-base. I have great experiences with it, but both Azure and AWS have different approaches to how they handle storage options including the NoSQL choices such as Azure Table Storage.<p>Additionally, I have used Nodejs on Azure. I truly enjoyed it when using Azure Table Storage for my database. Overall publishing to Azure was pretty simple and required minimal setup effort. Let me know if you have any questions!
I would seriously consider going straight to AWS and starting to learn their APIs. It is a much scaleable service and is relied upon by startups that have actually reached web scale ( like Instagram ). Seen that your webapp is in node, you could also benefit from node specific hosting platforms, like <a href="https://www.nodejitsu.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nodejitsu.com/</a>
If you're writing code in Node.js, I assume you're doing it on a Unix (Mac OSX or Linux) development environment.<p>If that's the case, I would suggest AWS or something like Linode. While Azure has Linux support, I think you'll probably be better off with a service where the majority of users are using Linux and they have more supported distributions. AWS is probably a better fit there.<p>If you're writing your node app on Windows, then I would undoubtedly go with Azure since you'll be able to utilize Microsoft support and will likely need it at some point.
I've used both and both are adequate for deploying a web application. That said, I'd recommend AWS if you're looking for more than just a box e.g dns, cdn etc.
> The price doesn't matter all I care about is performance, up-time and scale-ability.<p>AWS only has your 3rd requirement (scalability). If you care about the first two, you'll have to build that yourself using the API's to handle the random failures from AWS. I've never used Azure so I'm not sure on that side.<p>If price really doesn't matter (over the other things) you probably want something like Rackspace's Storm On Demand servers.