# AWS vs Azure for App Teams (2026) | GTS Infosoft

AWS and Azure run most of the internet between them, and either one will serve your product well. That's the boring truth nobody selling you a migration wants to say. AWS is the bigger platform with the deeper service catalog; Azure is the natural pick for companies already living inside Microsoft's world.

We deploy client backends to both from India — mostly AWS, some Azure — so this isn't theory. Below is what actually differs for a typical product team, and the situations where we'd argue for one over the other.

## The Case for AWS
- **Biggest catalog, biggest share** — AWS still leads the market and offers the widest spread of managed services — EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, DynamoDB and a couple hundred more. Whatever odd thing you need, there's usually a managed version of it.
- **Hiring and community** — More engineers know AWS than any other cloud. Docs, courses, and answered questions exist for nearly every failure mode you'll ever hit at 2 a.m.
- **A paved road for startups** — Amplify, App Runner, and Lightsail let a small team ship without a dedicated DevOps hire, and AWS Activate credits soften the first year's bill considerably.
- **Regions where our clients are** — Mumbai and Hyderabad for Indian users, Sydney for Australia, plenty of US regions. Latency is almost never the deciding problem.

## The Case for Azure
- **Microsoft shops fit naturally** — If your company runs on Entra ID, Microsoft 365, and .NET, Azure slots in with far less friction — single sign-on, existing admin skills, familiar support channels.
- **Enterprise licensing math** — Existing Microsoft agreements often carry discounts and committed spend that make Azure meaningfully cheaper than its list price. For many enterprises, that alone settles it.
- **Genuinely good PaaS** — App Service, Azure SQL, and AKS are excellent. Deploying a .NET or Node API to App Service is about as low-drama as hosting gets.
- **Azure OpenAI Service** — GPT models inside your own tenant, with enterprise data terms and regional hosting. For regulated clients adding AI features, that's a real and specific draw.

## Which Should You Pick?
- Pick AWS if you're a startup or product team with no existing Microsoft estate — the ecosystem, the talent pool, and the startup credits all tilt that way.
- Pick Azure if your organization already pays Microsoft. The licensing math plus identity integration usually ends the debate before performance charts ever enter it.
- Don't pick from price lists. Both are bafflingly complex to cost, and your architecture choices swing the bill far more than the vendor logo does.
- Skip multi-cloud unless a regulator forces it. It sounds safe but doubles your ops surface — pick one, get good at it, and stay portable with containers if exit risk worries you.

## FAQ

### Which is cheaper, AWS or Azure?
For comparable compute and storage, list prices land close enough that it rarely decides anything. What moves the bill is architecture — serverless versus always-on servers, egress, managed database sizing — plus committed-use discounts. Azure wins on price mainly for orgs with existing Microsoft agreements.

### Which is easier to learn?
Azure's portal is friendlier on day one; AWS has more third-party learning material for month six. Honestly, both sprawl. A team that knows one cloud well can pick up the other in a few weeks of real project work.

### Which do you recommend for a new SaaS product?
Usually AWS. It's our default stack, the hiring pool is deeper, and startup credits help early on. We'd steer you to Azure if your product is .NET-centric or your buyers are enterprises that already trust Microsoft paper.

### Can your team manage our cloud from India?
Yes — that's the normal arrangement. Our dedicated teams handle deployment, monitoring, and cost reviews from India at rates starting around USD 20/hr, with overlap hours matched to US and Australian time zones.

### What about Google Cloud?
A solid third option with strong data and ML tooling, and it pairs nicely with Firebase. Its enterprise footprint is smaller, so hiring and third-party integrations take a bit more effort. We're happy to talk through it if GCP is on your shortlist.

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Source: https://gtsinfosoft.com/aws-vs-azure · GTS Infosoft LLP