Both Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offer comprehensive cloud services with strengths in different areas. Azure has a larger global presence and a mature ecosystem, while OCI provides competitive pricing and flexible compute options, especially appealing to organizations heavily invested in Oracle's database and application stack. The choice depends on specific requirements, workload characteristics, and existing infrastructure.
| Attribute | Microsoft Azure | Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) |
|---|---|---|
| Compute Instance Pricing (per hour) | Azure VM pricing is typically calculated per second of usage. Options for reserved instances and spot VMs are available. | Standard.E4: $0.025 per OCPU, $0.0015 per GB memory; Ampere A1: $0.01 per OCPU, $0.0015 per GB memory; BM.GPU.H100.8: $10.00 per GPU. Linux OS is free; Windows requires a Microsoft license. |
| Storage Costs (per GB/month) | Azure Blob Storage starts at $0.0184 per GB/month for hot storage, decreasing to $0.01 for cool storage and $0.002 for archive storage. Premium storage is $0.015 per GB/month. Azure Table Storage ranges from 4.5 cents per GB per month (LRS) to 12.65 cents per GB per month (read-access geo-zone-redundant storage). Azure Queue Storage ranges from 4.5 cents to $0.075 cents per GB/month, depending on the redundancy option. Azure Files pricing ranges from $0.015 per GB/month for Cool storage to $0.016 per provisioned GiB/month for Premium file storage. | Block Volume: $0.0425 (Balanced); Object Storage: $0.0255 (Standard), $0.0026 (Archive); File Storage: ~$0.033. Archive storage has retrieval costs ($0.005 per GB) and early deletion fees ($0.0026 per GB if less than 90 days). Infrequent Access: $0.01 |
| Network Bandwidth Costs (per GB) | Inbound data transfers are free. Outbound data transfers cost extra. The first 100GB of data egress is free each month. From North America, Europe to any destination: $0.083 - $0.087 per GB. From Asia (excluding China), Australia, MEA to any destination: $0.085 - $0.12 per GB. VNET peering within the same Azure region costs about $0.01 per GB for inbound and outbound data transfers. | 10 TB free data egress per month. Charges up to 10x less than competitors for additional data transfers. |
| Virtual Machine Types Offered | Azure offers virtual machines for general purpose, compute-optimized, memory-optimized, storage-optimized, GPU, and high-performance computing. Examples include A-Series, B-Series, D-Series, E-Series, F-Series, G-Series, H-Series, Ls-series, M-series, and N-series. | VMs and bare metal instances. VM Types: Standard, Dense I/O, GPU, Optimized. Processors: AMD, Intel, Arm-based. Flexible Shapes allow customization of vCPUs and memory. Examples: Ampere A1, E4-based, E5-based, X9-based. |
| Global Region Availability | Azure is available in 60+ regions with a minimum of 3 availability zones per region. | Globally Distributed Exadata Database available in OCI regions worldwide. Cross-cloud connectivity with Azure in specific regions (e.g., Brazil, Canada, US East, Germany, Japan, Korea). |
| Compliance Certifications (e.g., HIPAA, SOC 2) | For detailed compliance information, it is best to consult the official Azure documentation. | Not available |
| Database Options (e.g., SQL, NoSQL) | Azure offers both SQL and NoSQL database options. | Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Database, MySQL, NoSQL. Oracle Database Service for Azure available. |
| Serverless Computing Capabilities | Azure provides Azure Functions and Azure Logic Apps for serverless computing. | OCI Functions (based on Fn Project). Supports Java, Python, Node, Go, Ruby, C#. Pay-per-use pricing. |
| Containerization Support (Docker, Kubernetes) | Azure offers Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Container Instances (ACI), and Azure Container Apps (ACA) for containerization. It supports both Docker and Kubernetes. | OCI Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE). Supports integration with OCI services. Free and premium cluster options. |
| AI/ML Services Offered | Azure offers a comprehensive suite of AI and ML services, including Azure Cognitive Services, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure AI Infrastructure. | OCI Data Science (managed Jupyter notebooks, pre-configured AI frameworks). AI Services: Digital Assistant, Speech, Language, Vision, Document Understanding. OCI AI Agent Platform (LLMs). Supports OpenAI's open weight models. |
| Security Features (e.g., DDoS protection, firewalls) | Azure provides DDoS protection and web application firewalls (WAF). | IAM, DDoS protection, WAF (SQL injection, XSS protection), Cloud Guard, Security Zones, Service Gateway (secure private connectivity). |
| Uptime SLA Guarantee | A single-instance virtual machine guarantees 99.9 percent VM connectivity. Deploying two or more virtual machines in Availability Sets increases guaranteed connectivity to 99.95 percent. Deploying instances in different Availability Zones raises it to 99.99 percent. | 99.95% uptime SLA for most IaaS and PaaS services. 99.9% uptime for manageability and 99.9% performance SLAs. Provides credits if downtime is experienced. |