Microsoft Azure → Amazon Web Services
AWS equivalent of Azure Virtual Machines
The closest AWS equivalent of Azure Virtual Machines is Amazon EC2.
About Azure Virtual Machines
| Provider | Microsoft Azure |
|---|---|
| Status | Generally available |
| What it is | On-demand Windows and Linux VMs with managed disks. Gen2 VMs default to Trusted Launch. Pay as you go, Spot, reservations, savings plan, and Azure Hybrid Benefit pricing. |
| Documentation | learn.microsoft.com |
| Pricing | Official pricing page |
AWS mappings (1)
| Capability | AWS equivalent | Match |
|---|---|---|
| Virtual machines (IaaS) | Amazon EC2 | Direct 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.