In this instance Amazon is taking a legacy service and enabling it for management of the modern cloud management plane.

Amazon provides the capability to leverage the identities in the managed instance of Windows AD or in a forest that has a trust with the managed instance to be leveraged in managing AWS resources.

Amazon does not require any data be synchronized. The reliance on this synchronization means the customer has to be comfortable synchronizing both directory data and password hashes to Azure AD.

Microsoft synchronizes users, passwords hashes, and groups from the Azure AD to a managed instance of Windows Active Directory.

Amazon provides a legacy (Windows AD is legacy folks) managed service while Microsoft provides a modernized service (Azure AD) which has been been integrated with a legacy service.

One table will outline the differences in general features while the other outlines the differences in security-related features. I extensively covered the benefits of a service over the course of the posts, so today I’m going to cover the key features of each service.

These services represent each vendor’s offering of a managed Windows Active Directory (AD) service.

Over the past year I’ve done deep dives into both Amazon’s AWS Managed Microsoft Active Directory and Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory Domain Services. Please reference the latest official documentation for both products to understand capabilities and features and how they compare at the time you are reading this post. Update June 2021: I’m surprised I have to say this, but technology changes rapidly in the cloud and this was a comparison of the technologies at a point in time.

Azure active directory domain services