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Amazon Web Services vs Microsoft Azure: cloud comparison
Updated: · Comparison generated from structured data
Direct answer
Choosing between Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure depends first on location, required services and GPU access. 4 documented capabilities are only available on Amazon Web Services and 0 only on Microsoft Azure. Measured performance is covered on the benchmark pages.
Executive summary
Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure document 25 and 21 of the same 26 criteria respectively, with 21 capabilities in common. Amazon Web Services bills per-second and Microsoft Azure bills mixed. Amazon Web Services has a Local Zone in Türkiye; Microsoft Azure has no infrastructure in Türkiye. Amazon Web Services offers H100, H200, L40S; Microsoft Azure offers H100, H200.
Key findings
- 01 Capabilities documented only by Amazon Web Services: Per-second or per-minute billing, S3-compatible object storage, Infrastructure located in Türkiye, NVIDIA L40S instances.
- 02 Capabilities documented only by Microsoft Azure: none.
Overview
| Amazon Web Services | Microsoft Azure | |
|---|---|---|
| Headquarters | Seattle, United States | Redmond, United States |
| Operator | Amazon Web Services, Inc. | Microsoft Corporation |
| Regions | Global regions; in Türkiye an Istanbul Local Zone (GA May 2026) with a subset of services, parented to Europe (Frankfurt). | Global regions; no announced region in Türkiye. Nearest European regions include Germany West Central and Italy North. |
| Billing model | Per second — On-demand Linux EC2 instances are billed per second with a 60-second minimum; other operating systems and services have their own meters. | Mixed — Usage-based pay-as-you-go with service-specific meters; reservations and savings plans available. Billing granularity for virtual machines is not recorded here as verified. |
| Documented capabilities | 25 / 26 | 21 / 26 |
| Technologies | Nitro System, S3 API, CloudFormation, Terraform | Azure Resource Manager, Bicep, Terraform |
Availability and regions
Amazon Web Services
- Europe (Frankfurt) eu-central-1 Generally available
- Istanbul Local Zone istanbul-local-zone Generally available
Microsoft Azure
- Germany West Central germanywestcentral Generally available
- Italy North italynorth Generally available
Features
| Criterion | AWS | Azure |
|---|---|---|
| Data residency | ||
| Infrastructure located in Türkiye Generally available compute and storage capacity physically located in Türkiye (full region or local zone). | Yes Istanbul Local Zone with a subset of services (GA May 2026); not a full region. | No No announced or launched region in Türkiye. |
| Compute & GPU | ||
| Virtual machine instances Self-service virtual machines with selectable CPU/RAM profiles. | Yes | Yes |
| Per-second or per-minute billing Standard compute billed at per-second or per-minute granularity rather than per started hour. | Yes Per-second for Linux on-demand (60 s minimum). | Unverified |
| Dedicated / single-tenant resources Dedicated hosts, bare metal or organisation-dedicated cloud capacity. | Yes Dedicated Hosts and bare-metal instances. | Yes Azure Dedicated Host. |
| NVIDIA H100 instances On-demand or reservable instances with NVIDIA H100 GPUs. | Yes | Yes |
| NVIDIA H200 instances On-demand or reservable instances with NVIDIA H200 GPUs. | Yes | Yes |
| NVIDIA L40S instances On-demand or reservable instances with NVIDIA L40S GPUs. | Yes | No Azure Local only. |
| Platform & automation | ||
| API and Terraform automation Documented API plus an available Terraform provider for infrastructure as code. | Yes | Yes |
| Open-source cloud stack (OpenStack-based) The provider publicly states that its IaaS control plane is built on OpenStack or an equivalent open-source stack. | No | No |
| Kubernetes | ||
| Managed Kubernetes Provider-operated Kubernetes control plane. | Yes | Yes |
| Kubernetes node autoscaling Worker node count scales automatically within configured limits. | Yes | Yes |
| Kubernetes LoadBalancer integration Services of type LoadBalancer provision a provider load balancer automatically. | Yes | Yes |
| Kubernetes storage classes (CSI) Persistent volumes provisioned dynamically through a provider storage class. | Yes | Yes |
| Storage & data | ||
| Block storage volumes Persistent, attachable and expandable block volumes. | Yes | Yes |
| Volume snapshots Point-in-time snapshots of block volumes. | Yes | Yes |
| S3-compatible object storage Object storage reachable through the S3 API or an S3-compatible API. | Yes Native S3. | No Blob Storage uses its own API. |
| Managed backup service Scheduled backup and restore for instances or volumes managed by the provider. | Yes | Yes |
| Managed database Provider-operated relational database service. | Yes | Yes |
| Networking | ||
| L4 load balancer (TCP/UDP) Transport-layer load balancing. | Yes | Yes |
| L7 load balancer (HTTP/HTTPS) Application-layer load balancing with HTTP health checks. | Yes | Yes |
| Reassignable static public IP Static public addresses that can be moved between resources (Floating/Reserved/Elastic IP). | Yes Elastic IP addresses. | Yes Static public IP resources re-associable between NICs. |
| Private networks / VPC Isolated tenant networks with custom CIDR ranges. | Yes | Yes |
| Virtual router with NAT Managed router or NAT gateway for egress and inter-subnet routing, including static routes. | Yes Route tables and NAT Gateway. | Yes Route tables and NAT Gateway. |
| Security groups / cloud firewall Stateful, API-managed network access rules. | Yes | Yes |
| Security & auditing | ||
| Control-plane audit logging A provider service that records management (API/console) operations against cloud resources. | Yes AWS CloudTrail. | Yes Azure Monitor Activity Log. |
| User identity attribution in audit events Each audit event identifies the authenticated principal that performed the operation. | Yes | Yes |
Pricing and GPUs
| Provider | NVIDIA H100 | NVIDIA H200 | NVIDIA L40S | Türkiye infrastructure |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services | Generally available EC2 P5 Single-GPU p5.4xlarge and 8-GPU p5.48xlarge sizes; availability varies by region. | Generally available EC2 P5e / P5en 8-GPU instances; availability varies by region. | Generally available EC2 G6e 1 to 8 L40S GPUs per instance. | Yes |
| Microsoft Azure | Generally available NC H100 v5 / ND H100 v5 NC H100 v5 with one or two H100 NVL GPUs; ND H100 v5 with eight H100 GPUs. | Generally available ND H200 v5 Eight H200 GPUs per VM. | Not offered L40S SKUs are documented for Azure Local / Azure Stack Hub (customer-site hardware). | No |
Prices are shown in the currency each provider publishes; no exchange-rate conversion is applied.
Benchmarks
Sources
- [1] Now Open — AWS Local Zones in Istanbul, Türkiye — AWS Official documentation accessed:
- [2] Introducing three new NVIDIA GPU-based Amazon EC2 instances (P5e, G6, G6e) — AWS Official documentation accessed:
- [3] Amazon EC2 On-Demand Pricing — AWS Official documentation accessed:
- [4] AWS CloudTrail User Guide — AWS Official documentation accessed:
- [5] List of Azure regions — Microsoft Official documentation accessed:
- [6] New Azure Region — Turkey (Microsoft Community Hub response) — Microsoft Official documentation accessed:
- [7] Use GPUs in AKS on Azure Local (supported GPU models) — Microsoft Official documentation accessed:
- [8] Azure Monitor activity log — Microsoft Official documentation accessed:
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