Microsoft Azure – Another Infrastructure Option for Magento Commerce Cloud Deployments

Magento Commerce merchants can now select Microsoft Azure as an infrastructure option for their cloud deployments, as announced on May 12th 2020. With the addition of Azure as a cloud infrastructure option, Magento Commerce Cloud can now be hosted on either AWS or Microsoft Azure.

“Amazon Web Services (AWS) powers the underlying Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for Magento Commerce Cloud. For Magento Commerce Cloud Pro projects, you can choose either AWS or Microsoft Azure for IaaS support.”

Source: Magento Azure

Image Credit: Magento

Azure is identical to AWS in architecture, performance, scalability, and features when used for Magento hosting. Additionally, the pricing and contractual SLAs (Service Level Agreements) are also the same.

Keeping many things identical with AWS, Azure strengthens Magento’s multi-cloud capability, empowers your store to improve global presence through more regional availability. The customer’s production and staging environments may be provisioned on any one of the following Azure regions:

Central US, East US, East US 2, West US 2, France Central, North Europe, UK South, West Europe, Japan East, Southeast Asia, Australia (Sydney)

Note: Currently, there are no Azure regions in LATAM satisfying high availability requirements (i.e., 3 availability zones in the same region); thus production, staging, and integration environments for LATAM must be HA hosted in a US region.

Currently, the customer’s Integration Environments will ONLY be available in the US. EMEA and APAC customers must be comfortable having their integration region hosted in the US.

Support is available for the commercial segment deals only; support for the enterprise segment is planned for the Q3 2020 timeframe.

There is no recommendation from Magento, keeping most of the things identical like features, capabilities, architecture, cost, performance, etc. If you do not have any preference and ask us – we would recommend the AWS as it has been used already as a hosting platform for a lot of Magento Commerce stores and is a kind of default deployment option.

Let’s narrow it down: Azure is currently not available to be used with a cloud starter and is currently available for Cloud Pro deals only. Starter deals can only be sold on AWS.

Currently, Azure hosting is only available for SMB (Businesses have less than 1 Billion as a company revenue).

Magento merchants can have a choice to migrate from AWS to Azure and vice-versa, but there should be a substantial reason for that. The migration between them is a complex process and would be handled on a case by case basis. Moreover, the customer has to bear the migration costs.