I’ve been on the shitty end of the operations business for a while & I’ve worked with bureaucratic organisations that thrive on presenting numbers to their managers & shareholders. One common thing seems to be moving workloads to the cloud to turn their datacenter liability/upfront costs/payroll to a monthly bill from either Satya Nadella or Jeff Bezos. Apparently the higher ups love this even though it means they’ll end up spending more on a yearly basis.
So here is what I have learnt by migrating virtual machines(& other stuff) a plenty to the clouds[shh don’t do it] & whether you should go for daddy bezos or daddy nadella:
Azure -
There is no real argument against Azure, the virtual machines run great most of the time whether you’re coming from a vmware site or a physical machine. The hyperV hosting gives you great access to the VMs to troubleshoot issues and if you have windows heavy workloads then the sweet discounts make this choice a no brainer. Just don’t stick to your on-prem failsafes, instead embrace the cloud and you will be fine. You can even use free migration using Azure Site Recovery & if you do come across a machine which just won’t migrate, you can always build it new in a few lines of YAML. Azure Active Directory(Entra?) works great out of the box for identity management immediately post migration, no need to mess around with third party identity management.
Most consultants sell these initial moves to the cloud by promising even greater cost savings in the future by utilising the native services & that is where Azure falls behind the Bezos offerring.
AWS -
Migration is dead simple in AWS & you don’t have to decide between the method you choose for migration. If the port 443 is open you can just migrate freely, unlike Azure which requires you to provision large VMs for compression and encryption in the source environment. There is a heap of support articles available & the community is very active in forums. The backend of an ec2 is who knows what and you will get inconsistent experience with serial console access, so troubleshooting options are extremely limited, if it works it works else go try something else. Windows VMs cost a ton more here, but they work just fine.
After you’re done messing with a identity management system(you’re not sharing keys right?) the path away from just ec2 instances to actually using features of the cloud are much more straightforward. However, this article is just about sticking with IaaS side of the cloud.
If I had to pick one I would go for Azure if all I had to do was migrate some 100 servers & get paid. If I had to go as far as modernizing the workloads into containers & k8s cluster I would go for AWS.
-Day 28 of May, 2024