Comparision between Azure Storage Account and AWS S3

In this article, i will compare the features of Azure Storage Account and AWS S3

Azure Storage Account : Azure Storage account is Microsoft’s cloud storage solution for modern data storage scenarios. Azure Storage account offers highly available, massively scalable, durable, and secure storage for a variety of data objects in the cloud.

Azure storage account provides a unique namespace for your Azure Storage data that’s accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS.

Azure Storage accounts benefits :

• Durable and highly available. Azure storage accounts support data redundency within a azure geo region and also between the azzure geo regions. Redundancy ensures that your data is safe in the event of transient hardware failures.
• Secure. All data written to an Azure storage account is encrypted by the using the microsoft service or server side encryption. If any client wants to manage this encryption by using their own encryption keys then use of your own key is also supported and its known as Customer Managed Keys (CMK).
• Fine grained control : Azure Storage provides you with fine-grained control over who has access to your data.
• Scalable. Azure Storage is designed to be massively scalable to meet the data storage and performance needs of today’s applications.
• Managed. Azure handles hardware maintenance, updates, and critical issues for you.
• Accessible: Data in Azure Storage is accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS.

What is Amazon S3

S3 stands for Simple Storage Service

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

Any customer can use Amazon S3 to store and protect any amount of data Amazon S3 provides management features so that you can optimize, organize, and configure access to your data to meet your specific business, organizational, and compliance requirements.

Amazon S3 benefits

Scalability: S3 is designed to scale effortlessly to store and retrieve any amount of data. It can handle trillions of objects and petabytes of data.

Durability and Availability: S3 ensures high durability by automatically replicating data across multiple geographically separated Availability Zones (AZs).

Security: S3 supports encryption at rest and in transit. You can use server-side encryption (SSE) with S3 managed keys or your own keys using AWS Key Management Service (KMS). S3 also provides access control mechanisms like bucket policies and access control lists (ACLs) to provide fine grained access to data.

Cross-Region Replication (CRR): With CRR, you can replicate data from one S3 bucket to another in a different AWS region. This feature is used to acheive disaster recovery capabilities and enables low-latency access to data for users in different regions.

Accessible: Data in Amazon S3 is accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTPS.

Should we use Azure storage or Aws S3 : As we have seen that both storage services provided almost similar kind of features. You can use which ever you want to use as per your cloud selection ( AWS or Azure).