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Bigstep Metal Cloud vs Azure

Microsoft Azure is a service that has seen rapid, sustained growth despite technical & stability issues.We've put together a side-by-side comparison to make it easy to make a decision.

 Bigstep Metal CloudAzure
Bare metal
Yes
No 
Minimum instance size
8 cores 32 GB RAM
1 core 1GB RAM
Self Service
Yes
Yes
Provisioning time

300 seconds

100-300 seconds

OS volume
iscsi
via "Managed disks"
Additional storage volumes
iscsi block devices
via "Managed disks"
On-demand
Yes (per second)

Yes (per second)

Migration-less upgrade support
Yes (with restart)
Yes 
Stop and resume support
Yes 
Yes
Service network config.
Yes (L2 & L3)
Yes (L3 only)
L2 technology
MPLS
N/A
Private LAN support
Yes
Yes (VPC)
API enabled
Yes
Yes
IPV6
Yes 
Yes
BGP support
Yes (custom)
Yes (native)
Shared filesystem support
Yes (via GFS -Bigstep SharedDrive)
Yes (via Azure Files - SMB)
Database as a Service
Couchbase, Cassandra, Exasol, 
PostgreSQL, MySQL (Percona), 
Elasticsearch
Azure Cosmos DB, SQL Database, Azure Database (MySql, PostgreSQL, MariaDB), Azure Cache (Redis), Azure Table Storage
Hadoop & Spark as a Service
Cloudera, MapR, Hortonworks, Mesos
EMR
Data Science Tools
Jupyter
SageMaker
Native container platform
Yes (Bigstep Container Platform)

Yes (Azure HDInsight)

Container Apps
Apache Spark, Streamsets, 
Apache Kafka, Zoomdata, Jupyter
No
Object Storage
Yes (Bigstep DataLake service)
Yes (Azure Blob Storage, Data Lake Store)
Serverless services
No
Service Fabric, IoT Hub, API Management
Other services
No
Many

Why choose Bigstep?

Single tenant, bare metal instances
at no extra cost

Our primary advantage comes from the performance and stability improvements that bare metal offers. There is no support for bare metal in Azure with the sole exception of SAP HANA machines. 

2x the compute performance

The Metal Cloud's typical performance improvement you should expect is 2x although it depends on the kind of workload you have. A customer found 20x improvement for deep learning model training.

6x lower network latency

The network latency is 6x lower in Bigstep than in Azure so microservices on Kubernetes will run faster in Bigstep.

Why choose AZURE?

Cognitive Services

We would lighlight Azure Cognitive Services which offer pre-packaged computer vision, speech recognition and synthethis, NLP, Bigstep Search servicies.

These services make it easy for application developers to integrate AI into their applications without having any data science knowledge. While all of them can be replicated with existing open source tools having access to Bing's data network effects enables much better models but does tie you to Azure. 

Closing words on managed services

The shier broadness of managed services might incline the user to opt for the "just in case I need it" scenario but one must remember that through open source (or commercial) alternatives most of the services can be easily replicated and managed by a 3rd party if the ops resources are not available. What that offers is (sometimes much) lower cost, vendor independence and control. 
 

As cloud services become comoditized, portability will be essential in being able to quickly leverage future cost reductions or stability issues. Contact us for help in designing a portable and high performance infrastructure. More on Bigstep Managed Services

Compare Bigstep with other:

Packet

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Google Cloud Platform

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Dedicated Servers

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Amazon Web Services

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