First Thoughts on Azure vs Aws as a young dev

Akshay Chavan — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 10:46:51 +0000

One thing I got very frustrated with Azure was what’s the diff between Azure WebApps and Azure VMs if WebApp is underlying a VM only? I could do it myself na, like create a VM and run my container there ;)
The answer was in, ofc, how much control and responsibility you want over the infrastructure. You can absolutely run your container on a VM (e.g., via Docker or AKS). But with App Service for Containers, you can just deploy your container image and let Azure handle the rest — no VM setup, patching, or scaling logic needed.

Then I was like why are AWS lookalikes - Beanstalk or App Runner - very rarely used in AWS community?
Coz AWS is made infra-heavy from the start, means those people preferred fine-grained control and customization (which I myself prefer, i like to be in control :P ). So something like App Service - Beanstalk feels too opinionated. So it’s like “If I’m going to manage infra, I might as well use ECS or EC2 directly.”
On the other hand, Azure is like a PaaS-first mindset. It was built with a strong enterprise and "developer productivity focus". So people using Azure prefer to just deploy on App Services and not care about underlying infra themselves.

Thanks :))

DEV Community: Akshay Chavan

First Thoughts on Azure vs Aws as a young dev