Azure vs AWS — Difference between Azure Virtual Network (VNet) and AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Ashish Patel
Awesome Azure
Published in
12 min readMay 25, 2019

--

Comparison: Azure Virtual Network (VNet) vs AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Azure VNet vs AWS VPC

The journey to the cloud begins with choosing a cloud provider and provisioning private networks or extending their on-premise network. Customers looking to provision their resources in the cloud can choose from the different private networks offered by the various cloud providers. The two most deployed private networks are Virtual Network (VNet) and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) from Microsoft and Amazon respectively. This blog looks at the similarities and differences between these two private network offerings with the goal of informing potential customers on what differentiates the two private networks and assist in their decision on which is suitable for their workload.

Amazon has been a fore runner in the cloud computing arena and pioneered many industry revolutionizing services like EC2, VPC etc. AWS’s initial offering EC2-classic platform allowed customers to run ec2 instances on a flat global network shared by all the customers, also there were other attributes including shared tenancy, restrictions on Security Groups and lack of Network Access control lists concerned security minded customers. AWS then introduced EC2-VPC, an advanced platform which provisions logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud. AWS EC2-VPC supports Shared/Dedicated Tenancy, Improved Network Security Groups/Network Access Control etc., Enterprise Customers and SMB customers gained more confidence with the VPC architecture and started adopting AWS better than before.

In 2013, Azure turned its focus from being just a PaaS provider into a Full-fledged IaaS provider to avoid the competitive edge and market loss. In order to compete with the early starter AWS, Azure introduced many new services and importantly Virtual Networks, “a Logically Isolated network” the VPC version of Azure within its Datacenter. Azure’s Virtual Network resembles VPC in many aspects and in fact behaves similar in many cases but there are few differences as well.

Conceptually, both the Azure VNet and AWS VPC provide the bedrock for provisioning resources and service in the cloud. Both networks provide the same building blocks but with a degree of…

--

--

Ashish Patel
Awesome Azure

Cloud Architect • 4x AWS Certified • 6x Azure Certified • 1x Kubernetes Certified • MCP • .NET • Terraform • DevOps • Blogger [https://bit.ly/iamashishpatel]