AWS Workspaces vs Azure Virtual Desktop

Amazon Workspaces and Microsoft Azure Windows Virtual Desktop, two titans of technology, square off in a fight for supremacy in virtual desktop infrastructure. Since its debut in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has dominated the Desktop as a Service (DaaS) market. Because of its wide range of offerings, AWS continues to lead the industry despite the fierce competition. Here we will discuss about AWS Workspaces vs Azure Virtual Desktop.

Enterprises have a plethora of options at their disposal thanks to the more than 175 service offerings, which include development tools, management tools, computing and database services, networking and mobile solutions, and more. Although Microsoft’s Azure Virtual Desktop was introduced in 2010 and included services for artificial intelligence, analytics, and the Internet of Things (IoT) that were comparable to those of AWS.

Azure is a great option for businesses who currently use Microsoft products because of its strong connectivity with existing products, including Visual Studio and Active Directory.

Even with all the features, which is better? Let’s find out.

AWS Workspaces vs Azure Virtual Desktop: Which is better?

OS Compatibility

Both Amazon Workspaces and Microsoft Azure Windows Virtual Desktop share many general capabilities, such as allowing users to connect to work resources remotely from any place and supporting web browsers and native applications.

The distinction, nevertheless, is in offering a comparable performance across several operating systems. Users of Amazon Workspaces have the choice of running Linux or Windows.

Suggested Reading: Get Enhanced VDI Experience on Linux

Azure Workspace offers the option of a shared virtual computer or a personal desktop, but is only compatible with Windows OS. Companies find that this shared option is a cost-effective strategy because it allows them to avoid incurring additional virtual machine costs.

Open Source Integration

Ansible, Jenkins, Docker, and GitHub are just a few of the open-source tools that Amazon Web Services (AWS) seamlessly integrates with. AWS also promotes the open-source community. On the other hand, SQL databases, Active Directory, and Visual Basic Script (VBS) are all natively supported by Microsoft Azure.

Although Microsoft has never been as committed to open-source as AWS, they have lately changed to support Hadoop clusters and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on Azure.

While Azure is more appropriate for developers using the.NET framework, AWS is typically a better choice for customers using Linux machines.

Pricing

It’s important to keep in mind that Microsoft Azure charges by the minute, whereas Amazon Web Services (AWS) charges on an hourly basis. On Amazon Workspace, a primary instance with two virtual CPUs and 8GB of RAM costs about $0.092/hour; on Azure, the identical instance costs about $0.096/hour.

However, as the architecture gets larger, Azure gets more expensive. For example, an AWS workspace larger instance with 256GB RAM and 64vPCU costs $3.20 per hour, but the identical configuration on Azure costs $6.76 per hour.

In terms of pricing flexibility, AWS’s pay-as-you-go strategy maximizes resource consumption to enable additional savings. Azure’s pricing structure, on the other hand, only allows for prepaid or monthly payments, providing less flexibility.

Conclusion

Azure and AWS are fierce rivals that each shine in a separate field. AWS is a bigger cloud service that offers better developer friendliness and a more affordable pricing structure.

Nevertheless, Azure shines at offering platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and Windows integration, making it more suited for big businesses that already use Microsoft products. Therefore, AWS is probably a better choice if a company needs infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or a variety of tools.