Azure vs AWS for Networking & Content Delivery

In line with our latest blog series highlighting how common cloud services are made available via Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), as published by Microsoft, this third blog in the series helps you understand Cloud Networking and Content Delivery capabilities of both Azure and AWS.

Before we jumpstart on the actual comparison chart of Azure and AWS, we would like to bring you some basics on cloud content delivery networking and the current trends on the subject.

If you would rather like to have quick look at the comparison table, click here

When we talk about cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) and the related networking capabilities it includes all the hardware and software that allows you to easily provision private networks, connect your cloud application to your on-premises datacenters, and more.

According to Gartner, Content delivery networks (CDNs) are a type of distributed computing infrastructure, where devices (servers or appliances) reside in multiple points of presence on multi-hop packet-routing networks, such as the Internet, or on private WANs. A CDN can be used to distribute rich media downloads or streams, deliver software packages and updates, and provide services such as global load balancing, Secure Sockets Layer acceleration and dynamic application acceleration via WAN optimization techniques.

In simpler terms, this highly distributed server platforms are optimized to deliver content in a way that improves customer experience. Hence, it is important to decrease latency by keeping the data closer to the users, protect it from security threats while ensuring rapid streamlined content delivery including general web delivery, content purge, content caching and tracking history as long as 90 days.

As per G2Crowd.com, most organizations use CDN services, such as web caching, request routing, and server-load balancing, to reduce load times and improve website performance. Further to qualify as a CDN provider, a service provider must:

Allow access to a geographically dispersed network of PoPs in multiple data centers
Help websites access this network to deliver content to website visitors
Offer services designed to improve website performance
Provide scalable Internet bandwidth allowances according to customer needs
Maintain data center(s) of servers to reduce the possibility of overloading individual instances

With this background, let’s look at the AWS vs Azure comparison chart in terms of Networking and Content Delivery Capabilities:

Service	Description	AWS	Azure
Cloud virtual networking	Provides an isolated, private environment in the cloud.	Virtual Private Cloud	Virtual Network
Cross-premises connectivity	Connects Azure virtual networks to other Azure virtual networks or customer on-premises networks. It also supports VPN tunneling.	AWS VPN Gateway	VPN Gateway
Domain name system management	Manage DNS records using the same credentials, billing, and support contract as other Azure services. Service that hosts domain names, routes users to Internet applications, manages traf c to apps, and improves app availability with automatic failover.	Route 53 Route 53	DNS Traffic Manager
Content delivery network	Global content delivery network that transfers audio, video, applications, images, and other les.	CloudFront	Content Delivery Network
Dedicated network	Establishes a dedicated, private network connection from a location to the cloud provider.	Direct Connect	ExpressRoute
Load balancing	Automatically distributes incoming application traf c to add scale, handle failover, and route to a collection of resources.	Elastic Load Balancing	Load Balancer Application Gateway

To read more about the Microsoft guide which briefs all about cloud by drawing comparisons between Azure or AWS, click here (link to PDF download)

You may also like to read our previous blogs in these series, if so, please click here:

https://www.cloudiqtech.com/azure-vs-aws-compute/
https://www.cloudiqtech.com/aws-vs-azure-cloud-storage/