Microsoft Azure → Amazon Web Services
AWS equivalent of Azure Dedicated Host
The closest AWS equivalents of Azure Dedicated Host are Amazon EC2 bare metal instances and Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts & Dedicated Instances.
About Azure Dedicated Host
| Provider | Microsoft Azure |
|---|---|
| Status | Generally available |
| What it is | Single-tenant physical servers grouped into host groups, with control over maintenance and placement. Billed per host. VMs on the host show a price of zero. |
| Documentation | learn.microsoft.com |
| Pricing | Official pricing page |
AWS mappings (2)
| Capability | AWS equivalent | Match |
|---|---|---|
| General-purpose bare-metal servers | Amazon EC2 bare metal instances | Partial match |
| Dedicated (single-tenant) hosts | Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts & Dedicated Instances | Direct match |
Virtual machines & images(1)
General-purpose bare-metal servers Partial match
EC2 offers .metal sizes for many instance families, and Azure doesn't. On Azure, the closest options are Azure Dedicated Host (single-tenant but still virtualized), nested virtualization on supported VM sizes, or purpose-built bare-metal services such as Azure VMware Solution hosts.
- EC2 bare metal instances behave like regular instances (EBS, VPC, Auto Scaling) and run your own hypervisor if you want one.
- Azure Dedicated Host gives physical isolation and host-level control, but VMs still run on the Azure hypervisor.
- For VMware workloads specifically, Azure VMware Solution (dedicated bare-metal hosts) and Amazon EVS (EC2 bare metal) are the comparable pair. See the VMware row.
Purchase options & licensing(1)
Dedicated (single-tenant) hosts Direct match
EC2 Dedicated Hosts map to Azure Dedicated Host. Both give you a whole physical server, billed per host, with control over placement.
- AWS has two options. Dedicated Hosts expose sockets and cores and support host affinity and broad BYOL. Dedicated Instances give hardware isolation without host visibility. Azure Dedicated Host is the only host-level product, and Azure also has "isolated" VM sizes that take a whole host.
- Maintenance. Azure Dedicated Host lets you control platform maintenance windows through maintenance configurations. EC2 Dedicated Hosts support host recovery and host maintenance settings.
- Licensing. On EC2, AWS-provided RHEL or SUSE AMIs can't be used on Dedicated Hosts (you must bring your own AMI). Azure Dedicated Host is commonly used with Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server and SQL Server.