Azure Ultra Disks & AWS io2 EBS
Azure’s Ultra Disks as a product (launched 2019) seems to be following the steps of AWS’s io1/io2 (Provisioned IOPS launched in 2012) service, which basically prices provisioned IOPS and storage separately.
Azure’s Ultra Disks’ documentation lists several limitations (e.g. They can’t be used as OS disks, do not support disk encryption nor Site Recovery etc.). They are also restricted by regions (e.g. Only Central India region out of the three in India supports Ultra disks). Azure itself states that ‘Ultra disks are suited for data-intensive workloads such as SAP HANA, top tier databases…’.
Despite the limitations that we observe, Azure Ultra Disks seems to be priced competitively compared to AWS.
Azure Ultra Disk – (512 GB, 4000 IOPS) – Singapore Region Costs:
$79.61 for storage + $256.96 for IOPS = Total $345.45 / month
AWS io2 Disk – (512 GB, 4000 IOPS) – Singapore Region Costs:
$70.66 for storage + $288.00 for IOPS = Total $358.66 / month
(Note: All pricing based on public pricing from respective Cloud service providers, before EDP or contractual discounts).
While the pricing appears to be marginally higher (~4%) in AWS for IOPS ($.072/IOPS-month compared to 0.0642/IOPS-month on Azure Ultra Disk), there is (as always) a catch. Azure’s Ultra Disks come in t-shirt sizes of 128, 256, 512 GB volumes, whereas AWS io2 provides for ‘truly’ provisioned storage of any size. E.g. a 380 GB io2 volume.
Takeaways:
1) Azure Ultra Disks are GA in your region (at least one region per geo). However, there are serious limitations that you need to pay attention to.
2) The pricing of provisioned IOPS volumes are largely similar on AWS and Azure, but the ability to provision storage volumes of any size could bring down your storage costs on AWS. Factor that in while comparing clouds.
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Posted by Ramesh – CloudRunr
