Dylan B. answered • 11/10/20
Computer science Tutor, Associates degree, Real world experience
Azure and AWS (as IaaS) are pretty much a match these days. You'll find a lot of things that weren't in Azure are coming thick and fast, and there are unique features as well. Azure just rolled out version 1.3 which adds a lot of functionality.
Azures key differentiator is that it is PaaS - platform as a service - you don't have to maintain the VMs yourself (security, service packs etc) just your application code.
Cloudfront - Azure offers CDN so thats covered. SNS - Look at Azure Appfabric, there's some amazing stuff on the Service Bus for pub sub and projections.
AppFabric also offers federated identity services (ADFS, OAuth, Facebook, google, twitter etc) and caching. Coming soon is also Workflow services,Connect (VPN) and composite services.
One of Azures big selling points is SQL Azure - it's a full triple replicated HA database (now with reporting services) on the cloud, not just a "web database".
Azure roles are also not "just VMs" although those are now available, They abstract OS management away from you so you just have to worry about your app, azure takes care of service management.
