Microsoft Corp. has published a new Azure Cloud Services Map for information technology personnel that lets them compare its range of cloud computing services against those of Amazon Web Services Inc.

Like Amazon, Microsoft’s cloud services portfolio has grown in leaps and bounds over the years, and that makes it very difficult to compare the various services and features that each company offers. So Microsoft is trying to help out with a new document that lays out the main differences and similarities between their two offerings. The idea is that customers can use the Cloud Services Map to better plan migrations and multi-cloud environments.

By publishing the map, Microsoft is recognizing that a growing number of organizations are going down the multicloud avenue. It has become very common for businesses to adopt more than one cloud provider for their IT needs in order to leverage the advantages of the different services they offer. As such, Microsoft’s new map should help companies to map out those strategies a little more easily, the company said.

“Whether you are planning a multi-cloud solution with Azure and AWS, or simply migrating to Azure, you will be able to use this service map to quickly orient yourself with the services required for a successful migration,” Michael Crump, a technical product manager at Microsoft Azure, wrote in a blog post. “You can use the service map side-by-side with other useful resources found in our documentation.”

Microsoft’s Cloud Services Map covers 13 distinct categories, including big data, compute, databases and storage. The document shows that Microsoft and AWS offer comparable services in many areas, though there are some cases where Azure has products where AWS does not, and vice versa.

Microsoft’s cloud map can be downloaded here.

Image: Microsoft