In what ways is AWS superior to Azure, not trolling I am genuinely interested!
Despite Azure being newer in some ways, it's still not as easy to use as AWS (conceptually and practically) and does not have the portfolio breadth for services and depth of features in each of these. There is also a considerably larger ecosystem (think tools, marketplace etc.) around AWS at the moment and its more friendly to those working against the API with good language/library coverage (excellent libraries like boto). AWS also excels around security controls with IAM, KSM, DDoS, compliance etc.
http://www.networkworld.com/article...n-amazon-web-services-vs-microsoft-azure.html
Still, not unexpected since they are playing catch-up. They really need to focus on ease of use though, I'm not seeing much progress here.
Ultimately these sorts of providers are miles apart from "traditional hosting" due to their focus on application workloads and services which can be used as building blocks for part of said application services. Look at AWS Lambda as an example, a completely server-less service and a peek into the future, for sure. The REAL value in these platforms are these very service offerings, e.g:
"I want to build a highly scalable gaming platform."
Great, then instead of spinning up a load of VM's then writing and managing a load of components yourself you'd say:
"Ok, I'll use cloudfront to serve static content in a localised manner, I'll use EC2 with autoscaling and load balancing together with CloudWatch metrics to provide scalable and compute layers, I'll use VPC for secure network topologies for tiers, I'll use DynamoDB for OLTP, I'll take EMR and use that with Data Pipeline and RedShift for ETL and analytics. Furthermore, I'll orchestrate and manage all of this through CloudFormation and then use CloudWatch, Config and CloudTrail to help me manage and monitor."
or
"Lambda it."
Anyhow, the idea is that when building an application you use these services to decrease time to market and thus time to value with something that ultimately makes you money.