Design Project 1 Findings - drewwbikk/capstone GitHub Wiki

General Comparison Conclusion

For a larger enterprise operation with an expansive infrastructure and dedicated IT team, Microsoft Azure is the hands-down choice with their hybrid cloud services they offer. While it is reported that they have good technical support, Amazon’s AWS is more flexible for the approach outlined in this project. With more expansive Linux options and better networking services, AWS is an overall better choice for the hybrid cloud approach I will be taking in this project: using individual services like EC2, and without employing these company’s services on-premise.

On top of this, with Amazon’s easy-to-follow documentation, that will be helpful for, not only this implementation, but theoretical future implementations in real small/medium-sized businesses, where the IT team and/or knowledge may be limited. It is invaluable to have thorough documentation for specific issues with deployment or maintenance down the road.

Pricing Comparison Conclusion

Overall, Microsoft Azure's relevant services are generally less expensive, but only by about less than 10% in most categories, except higher-tier Windows Memory Optimized instances. In this application, however, higher-tier Memory-optimized instances may not be useful, so that large price difference may not matter.

In all other instances, the price difference is insignificant enough that other aspects of the two services should be considered: ease-of-use, feature set, and compatibility with currently-used services/applications.

ADDS Conclusion

AWS’s Quickstarts, different ADDS configuration options, and extensive documentation make it the easy winner for which provider ADDS is better to be deployed on. While Azure has the advantage of being developed and supported by Microsoft, AWS’s integration is almost, if not as good, as Azure’s. Therefore, AWS’s additional benefits, features, and flexibility outweigh those of Azure.

Final Recommendation

After thorough research into the differences between AWS and Azure in the lens of this project, I am recommending and going forward with using AWS in the implementation. While Microsoft’s Azure has a slight edge in pricing, Amazon’s AWS has more features, documentation, and support for open source services. When considering a small to medium sized business, documentation is so important, since the IT team at those businesses may be smaller, less experienced in cloud solutions, or generally less technically savvy. Extensive and thorough documentation can make the difference in a smooth deployment and high availability, even through maintenance periods.

On top of this, AWS’s ADDS flexibility and Quickstarts are perfect for this use-case. A Quickstart would allow for quick and easy deployment of the service if needed, but AWS’s guides and documentations can be followed for a more granular deployment as well. On top of this, less technically advanced or smaller IT teams can use AWS Managed Microsoft AD for a fully managed, redundant, highly available domain controller, already optimized for small to medium sized businesses.