Today I was discussing about my first Windows Azure project and came to know some interesting things and some comparison between the Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services. Each has its own advantages and disadvantage, to my followers who frequently ask me about what Azure is and when to use the Azure cloud this comparison chart will give some insight on the things to consider. Below Comparison chart will provide with easy comparison between the Windows Azure and Amazon EC2 Web Services cloud terminologies.

	Microsoft Windows Azure	Amazon Web Services
Free Trial	https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial/	http://aws.amazon.com/free/
Compute Instance	ExtraSmall, Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large	Micro, Small, Large, Extra Large
Compute VM	VM Role Instance	EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Instance
Scaling	Auto Scaling Blocks	Auto Scaling
Identity Management	AppFabric ACS (Access Control System)	IAM
Messaging	Service Bus	SNS (Simple Notification Services)
Caching	AppFabric Cache	Elastic Cache
CND	Azure CDN	Cloud Front
Storage Blob	Azure Blob	S3
Storage Tables	Azure Tables	Simple DB
Storage Drive	Azure Drives	EBS (Elastic Block Storage)
Database	SQL Azure	MySQL, Oracle
Queues	Azure Queues	SQS (Simple Queue Services)
Connect	Azure Connect	VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)
Load Balancing	Azure Load Balance	Elastic Load Balance
Traffic Manager	Azure Traffic Manager	NA
Monitoring Tools	AzureWatch(3rd Party)	CloudWatch

This article is just a start on the comparison, we will see in depth on each of the topics on the go to get complete idea to proceed with the best options before start designing the cloud.