AWS vs Azure — Compute Instance Pricing

AWS EC2 and Azure Virtual Machines are the two most widely used compute services, and choosing between them on prezzo alone can save your team thousands of dollars per month. This confronto puts equivalent general-purpose istanza families side by side, using published list prezzos for the baseline US regiones (us-east-1 for AWS, East US for Azure).

Equivalent General-Purpose Instances

The table below matches AWS m5 and m6i istanzas with the Azure Dv4/Dv5 series by vCPU and memory. All prezzos are for Linux on-demand hourly rates.

On-demand pricing for these general-purpose families is effectively identical between AWS and Azure at the list level. The real costo difference appears when you apply reservation scontos.

1-Year Reserved Instance Pricing

Azure’s 1-year Reserved Instances come in fractionally cheaper for the equivalent size, but the difference is within 1 percent and rarely the deciding factor. The bigger lever is whether your carico di lavoro is steady-state enough to justify the commitment in the first place — see our riservata istanzas guida for the strategy.

Spot / Preemptible Pricing

Spot pricing fluctuates with supply, but Azure Spot VMs are consistently 10 to 15 percent cheaper than AWS Spot Instances for equivalent general-purpose sizes. If your carico di lavoro is interruptible — batch jobs, CI runners, stateless web tiers — Azure Spot can be the cheaper default. See our spot istanzas guida for interruption-handling patterns.

Key Differences Beyond Price

• Billing granularity — AWS bills per second with a 60-second minimum; Azure bills per minute rounded up. For short-lived carico di lavoros, the per-minute rounding can add 5 to 10 percent to the bill.
• B-series burstable — Azure’s B-series is significantly cheaper than AWS t3 for the same vCPU/RAM at low utilization, because Azure does not charge for CPU credits above the baseline.
• Azure Hybrid Benefit — organizations with existing Windows Server or SQL Server licenses can reuse them on Azure for up to 85 percent off, a sconto AWS cannot match.

Verdict

For Linux general-purpose on-demand and riservata carico di lavoros, AWS and Azure are within 1 percent of each other and the choice should be driven by team expertise and existing tooling. For Windows carico di lavoros with existing licenses, Azure Hybrid Benefit typically wins. For interruptible carico di lavoros, Azure Spot VMs are the cheaper default.