Cloud Equivalents

Amazon Web Services → Microsoft Azure

Azure equivalent of Amazon EC2

The Azure equivalent of Amazon EC2 is Azure Virtual Machines.

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About Amazon EC2

ProviderAmazon Web Services
StatusGenerally available
What it isResizable virtual servers (instances) on the Nitro System, with On-Demand, Spot, Savings Plans, Reserved Instance, and Dedicated purchase options.
Documentationdocs.aws.amazon.com
PricingOfficial pricing page

Azure mappings (1)

CapabilityAzure equivalentMatch
Virtual machines (IaaS)Azure Virtual MachinesDirect match
Virtual machines & images(1)

Virtual machines (IaaS) Direct match

The Azure equivalent of Amazon EC2 is Azure Virtual Machines. Both are general-purpose IaaS VMs with per-second billing, Spot, commitment discounts, and dedicated-host options.

  • Networking model. An EC2 instance sits in a VPC subnet with security groups attached to its network interface. An Azure VM's NIC sits in a VNet subnet, filtered by NSGs on the NIC and/or subnet. Public IPs are separate resources on Azure.
  • Stopping. A stopped EC2 instance isn't billed for compute. On Azure, a VM stopped from inside the OS keeps billing for compute. Only "Stopped (deallocated)" from the portal, CLI, or API stops compute charges.
  • Disks. EC2 uses EBS volumes plus optional instance store. Azure uses managed disks (Standard HDD/SSD, Premium SSD v1/v2, Ultra) plus an optional temporary or local NVMe disk on "d" sizes.

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