Microsoft Azure vs Amazon EC2: Which is a better fit?

Rilwan: My name is Rilwan, I'm the product designer/co-founder for Aetiv Media Limited. Right now, we've got a team of six people, me included, and on a scale of one to five, I'll give Microsoft Azure a five. Thanks. Before we started using Microsoft Azure, we used to host our mobile platforms and mobile apps on a couple of different platforms. So the way it works is the hosting, the data, the server all were done on different platforms altogether. So we would use DigitalOcean, we would use Namecheap as well. So those are the two we were using before we had to move to Microsoft Azure. Yeah. The main reason would be the software provides everything we need. The platform provides everything we need, so everything the other platform provides we can always get it on Microsoft Azure. And when you're dealing with data, security is paramount, so it makes more sense for you to just make sure all your things are in one place, which was one of the main reason why we add some move to Microsoft Azure. The ease of setting up, it's a bit complicated because you need a technical know-how, but we have someone. We have the right personnel in our engineering department, so that was easier for him. So somebody that probably doesn't have an idea of programming, or trying to install, or trying to set up the process, that might be an issue. They've got lots of videos to actually walk you through it, but sometimes it can get a little bit complicated. But if you've got the right person, which we had, the set a process is easy. In regards to that, it depends on the nature of your business or the size of your business actually. But when you get to a point where you're getting hundreds of customers, tens of thousands of people using your platform, it makes that sense for you to want to save time, want to save cost a little bit. And so at that point, I would advise you go for Microsoft Azure, because literally everything you need is on the platform. And so if you've got any issue with everything, you can just go onto the help center and there'll be the help for you, compared to you trying to use different platforms because now you have to make sure this platform is linked to this one, that one is linked to that one. But if it's just one and you feel like you need it, then definitely that will be the best option for your small business to actually implements. Thanks.

Justin: Hi, I'm Justin, DevOps Engineer, and I give O'Reilly Learning Platform four out of five stars. For more reviews like these, please click the link below. Before using O'Reilly, I used a couple of different resources. First, classic paper books. Great as a resource, poor at aging. In this day and age, especially with DevOps technology, paper books age like you wouldn't believe, and use something that was a little bit more up to date. So I tried other learning platforms like A Cloud Guru and Lennox Academy. Great video content, up to date a little bit more, but they didn't have the depth of books. So I needed to have something that gave me access to a lot of books that was very in-depth and up to date. I looked at O'Reilly because I'm familiar with a lot of their books. Over the years I've used I don't know how many O'Reilly books. So I figured they had a service Safari, it is what it used to be called. They've since morphed it into O'Reilly Learning Platform, where they give you so much more than just books. For one subscription, you get access to a whole treasure trove of 200 plus publishers, plus video courses, plus live events you can go to. Nothing else even comes close in terms of the breadth of knowledge you get and the amount of learning styles it covers. Getting started with O'Reilly was pretty simple. They have a great search feature and you can put in a topic like AWS or Linux, and you can see the different types of content that they have. Not just books, but also video series, and talks that are coming up, and all that kind of stuff. You can also search for specific technical questions like, How do I write a for loop in Python? And O'Reilly search is smart enough to know where you need to look for that. Not only in books, but also in videos too, which is really nice. If you're thinking about getting O'Reilly, there are two things you ought to know. First, unlike some digital platforms that give you access to books, you don't get to keep any of the books you have access to. I think PAC and a couple of others tended to do this at least at one point. The other thing is, O'Reilly does not have any sort of cloud-based sandboxes right now. Like A Cloud Guru has a feature where you can spin up a new AWS account just for your personal experimentation for free and try stuff out in it. O'Reilly has sandboxes of their own, but they're basically like individual servers. As far as getting an actual cloud account, that feature is in beta; but as of today, that's not currently available.