Don’t you just love it when two rivals have a go at one another! Amazon and Microsoft may be the two leaders in the cloud race, but neither company wants to let the other off easy.
Not when reputations are at stake.
While the illustrious JEDI cloud contract has been the talking point lately for the two cloud giants, there is another place where AWS and Azure have their horns locked.
Apparently, a recent study that Microsoft commissioned found that the company’s cloud platform is both faster and cheaper than Amazon Web Services. This research was conducted by GigaOm, and published in December.
It compared the costs of SQL Server databases on Microsoft Azure against AWS, and found that Azure was up to 3.4 time faster and up to 87% less expensive in that scenario.
Big claims, as you can see.
And, well, let’s just say that the folks over at Amazon Web Services were not pleased
Not pleased at all.
AWS general manager of enterprise and benchmarking Fred Wurden, argued against the study in a pretty straightforward rebuttal published last week, claiming that the study was not valid due to certain conditions not being met:
“Microsoft and GigaOm use configurations of AWS that generate weaker performance, they have not been transparent on how it was run, and the benchmarks are not reproducible.”
Makes sense.
Amazon is not alone in casting doubt over this study. Corey Quinn, CEO of Duckbill Group and an expert in cloud pricing structure also had some choice words for the study, terming it worthless.
Well, what can you do, eh?
