Azure Ranks #1 for Cloud Storage

I normally don’t just re-report other people’s blogs unless I’m answering a specific partner question. But in my partner discussions around Azure I’m frequently asked to compare Azure against Amazon Web Services. My typical  response is:

“For any commodity workload Microsoft Azure will meet the price and exceed the performance of the equivalent Amazon Web Service. We want to remove price from the customer’s decision process and focus on what will provide the best solution.”

The challenge is finding supporting information for that claim. From one of the original price match announcement blogs: https://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/03/31/microsoft-azure-innovation-quality-and-price/ there is the quote:

“commitment to match Amazon on prices for commodity services”

But what about the performance claim. Today, I was pleased to see an article from Fortune titled “Microsoft cloud storage comes up roses in latest survey” which reviews the choice of cloud storage provider Nasuni’s choice to use Azure for their cloud storage. Their study took place over several months and involved several performance factors. What I really liked was:

“When Nasuni initially launched its service, it relied heavily on Amazon’s storage but in the past few years, based on its own testing, it started putting new customer data into Azure.”

It’s not good enough just to rank us better, we need to be enough better to warrant the investment to change infrastructures!

  Steve