Amazon Web Services just attacked a Microsoft-commissioned study claiming that its Azure cloud is faster and cheaper
- A Microsoft-sponsored study found that the Microsoft Azure cloud is faster and cheaper than Amazon Web Services in a certain common scenario.
- It's the latest row in an escalating debate between Microsoft and AWS about costs as cloud market competition intensifies.
- Microsoft has made similar claims before, with an exec recently claiming that its Azure cloud was 5 times cheaper than AWS in certain situations.
- While Microsoft has been gaining significant traction as a major cloud player, it's still seen to lag far behind the dominant Amazon Web Services.
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Microsoft and Amazon Web Services are once again sparring over which cloud offers customers the best deal.
A study commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by GigaOm and published in December compared costs and performance when running Microsoft's SQL Server database software on the Microsoft Azure cloud, versus the competing AWS product EC2. The study found that Azure was "up to 3.4 times faster and up to 87 percent less expensive" than AWS in that scenario.
Amazon Web Services on Thursday published a rebuttal, with Fred Wurden, general manager of enterprise and benchmarking, saying the study is not credible "because Microsoft and GigaOm use configurations of AWS that generate weaker performance, they have not been transparent on how it was run, and the benchmarks are not reproducible."
Amazon isn't the only one skeptical of the study: Corey Quinn, CEO of the Duckbill Group and a specialist in cloud pricing, tweeted such a study is "worthless" if it's sponsored by a company with a major stake in the outcome.
Microsoft has yet to respond.
The debate about costs between the two companies is escalating as competition in the cloud market intensifies. Amazon at Gartner's last count this summer had more than three times the second-place Microsoft's market share - about 47.8% to 15.5%, respectively. Microsoft Azure is generally expected to be gaining traction in the market though, particularly after its still-contested win of a $10 billion Pentagon cloud contract.
Microsoft's Azure cloud business just showed accelerating growth - albeit modestly - for the first time in years. AWS revenue growth rate slowed slightly, but it's still a much bigger business than Azure. Exactly how much isn't clear since Microsoft doesn't report specific revenue figures for Azure, only the rate of growth.
Which cloud is cheaper?
The cost debate between AWS and Microsoft primarily surrounds which cloud is cheaper for running Windows and SQL Server, both foundational software at many large companies.
Microsoft created the Windows Server server operating system and SQL Server database management system years ago - Windows Server was introduced in 2003, while SQL server goes all the way back to 1989 - and they've since become the cornerstone to the IT infrastructure at companies large and small. But while they were Microsoft inventions, both products are supported on rival clouds including AWS and Google Cloud Platform.
This episode comes not long after a Microsoft executive touted a statistic that the company's Azure platform is five times cheaper than AWS when running Windows in the cloud.
"A lot of customers start their cloud journey thinking about migration as a way to save costs, drive productivity, maybe even increase agility," Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Cloud Marketing Takeshi Numoto said during a UBS Global conference last month. "We're basically five-times cheaper, for example, versus AWS in a lot of these migration scenarios."
Microsoft can provide a "big economic advantage" to cloud customers because of its "rich history" with products like Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server, Numoto said.
Microsoft declined to provide more information on Numoto's claims. The cost comparison to which the exec is referring appears to be from 2018 when Microsoft compared the cost of running Windows Server and SQL Server workloads in a specific scenario and region and said Azure cost five times less than AWS.
AWS declined to comment about Numoto's comments, but Amazon Web Services Vice President Sandy Carter in an April blog post said Microsoft's cost comparisons are misleading when it comes to running Windows workloads in the cloud. AWS says it runs Windows-based workloads such as Windows Server and SQL Server for companies like Adobe and Salesforce.
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