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Azure Synapse Analytics VS Amazon SageMaker

Compare Azure Synapse Analytics VS Amazon SageMaker and see what are their differences

Azure Synapse Analytics logo Azure Synapse Analytics

Get started with Azure SQL Data Warehouse for an enterprise-class SQL Server experience. Cloud data warehouses offer flexibility, scalability, and big data insights.

Amazon SageMaker logo Amazon SageMaker

Amazon SageMaker provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly.
  • Azure Synapse Analytics Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-23
  • Amazon SageMaker Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-15

Azure Synapse Analytics features and specs

  • Integration
    Azure Synapse Analytics integrates with other Azure services like Azure Data Lake Storage, Power BI, and Azure Machine Learning, enabling seamless data movement and business intelligence processes.
  • Scalability
    It allows on-demand scalability, both horizontally and vertically, providing the flexibility to handle workloads of any size efficiently.
  • Unified Experience
    Offers a unified interface for data ingestion, preparation, management, and serving, simplifying data operations and reducing the need for multiple tools.
  • Advanced Security
    Includes robust security features like encryption, network protection, and advanced threat protection to ensure data security and compliance.
  • Serverless and Dedicated Options
    Provides both serverless and dedicated resource models, allowing businesses to optimize their costs by selecting the appropriate compute resources for their needs.

Possible disadvantages of Azure Synapse Analytics

  • Complexity
    The comprehensive range of features and tools can lead to a steep learning curve and complexity in setup and management for new users.
  • Cost Management
    Although flexibility is offered, managing and predicting costs can be challenging, especially in serverless scenarios where usage might fluctuate.
  • Resource Limitations
    Despite its scalability, there might be certain limitations in terms of data size or query complexity compared to some on-premises solutions.
  • Dependency on Internet Connectivity
    As a cloud-based solution, it requires stable and reliable internet connectivity, which may not be available in all regions or circumstances.
  • Integration Learning Curve
    While integration is a strength, mastering the integration with various Azure services and third-party tools can require substantial time and effort.

Amazon SageMaker features and specs

  • Fully Managed Service
    Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that eliminates the heavy lifting involved with setting up and maintaining infrastructure for machine learning. This allows data scientists and developers to focus on building and deploying machine learning models without worrying about underlying servers or infrastructure.
  • Scalability
    Amazon SageMaker provides scalable resources that can automatically adjust to the needs of your workload, ensuring that you can handle anything from small-scale experimentation to large-scale production deployments.
  • Integrated Development Environment
    SageMaker includes a built-in Jupyter notebook interface, which makes it straightforward for data scientists to write code, visualize data, and run experiments interactively without leaving the platform.
  • Support for Popular Machine Learning Frameworks
    SageMaker supports popular frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, Apache MXNet, and more. It also provides pre-built algorithms that can be used out-of-the-box, offering flexibility in choosing the right tool for your ML tasks.
  • Automatic Model Tuning
    SageMaker includes hyperparameter tuning capabilities that automate the process of finding the best set of hyperparameters for your model, thus saving significant time and computational resources.
  • Advanced Security Features
    SageMaker integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for fine-grained access control, supports encryption of data at rest and in transit, and complies with various security standards, ensuring that your machine learning projects are secure.
  • Cost Management
    With SageMaker, you only pay for what you use. This pay-as-you-go pricing model allows for better cost management and optimization, making it a cost-effective solution for various machine learning workloads.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon SageMaker

  • Complexity for New Users
    The plethora of features and options available in SageMaker can be overwhelming for beginners who are new to machine learning or the AWS ecosystem. It might require a steep learning curve to become proficient in using the platform effectively.
  • Vendor Lock-In
    Using Amazon SageMaker ties you to the AWS ecosystem, which can be a disadvantage if you want flexibility in switching between different cloud providers. Migrating models and workflows from SageMaker to another platform could be challenging.
  • Cost Management Challenges
    While SageMaker offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, the costs can quickly add up, especially for large-scale or long-running tasks. It may require diligent monitoring and optimization to avoid unexpectedly high bills.
  • Resource Limitations
    While SageMaker is highly scalable, there are certain resource limits (like instance types and quotas) that might be restrictive for very high-demand or specialized machine learning tasks. These limits could potentially hinder the flexibility you get from an on-premises or custom deployed solution.
  • Integration Complexity
    Integrating SageMaker with other tools and systems within your workflow might require additional development effort. Custom integrations can be complex and could involve additional overhead to set up and maintain.

Azure Synapse Analytics videos

Azure Synapse Analytics - Next-gen Azure SQL Data Warehouse

More videos:

  • Review - Is Azure SQL Data Warehouse the Right SQL Platform for You?

Amazon SageMaker videos

Build, Train and Deploy Machine Learning Models on AWS with Amazon SageMaker - AWS Online Tech Talks

More videos:

  • Review - An overview of Amazon SageMaker (November 2017)

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Azure Synapse Analytics and Amazon SageMaker)
Office & Productivity
44 44%
56% 56
Data Science And Machine Learning
Development
100 100%
0% 0
AI
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Azure Synapse Analytics and Amazon SageMaker

Azure Synapse Analytics Reviews

Data Warehouse Tools
Azure Synapse Analytics (formerly Azure Data Warehouse) is a cloud-native data warehouse integrated with other Azure services. It unifies data warehousing and big data analytics for comprehensive insights, offering visually interactive tools for user-friendly data exploration.
Source: peliqan.io
Top 6 Cloud Data Warehouses in 2023
Azure Synapse analytics is scalable for large data tables based on its distributed computing. It relies on the MPP (mentioned in the beginning, revisit if you did not grasp it) to quickly run high volumes of complex queries across multiple nodes. With Synapse, there’s an extra emphasis on security and privacy.
Source: geekflare.com
Top 5 BigQuery Alternatives: A Challenge of Complexity
Azure SQL Data Warehouse, now subsumed by Azure Synapse Analytics, brings together the worlds of big data analytics and enterprise data warehousing. Over the years, Azure has made a name for enabling the seamless transfer of data between on-premise and cloud ecosystems.
Source: blog.panoply.io

Amazon SageMaker Reviews

7 best Colab alternatives in 2023
Amazon SageMaker Studio is a fully integrated development environment (IDE) for machine learning. It allows users to write code, track experiments, visualize data, and perform debugging and monitoring all within a single, integrated visual interface, making the process of developing, testing, and deploying models much more manageable.
Source: deepnote.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Amazon SageMaker seems to be a lot more popular than Azure Synapse Analytics. While we know about 44 links to Amazon SageMaker, we've tracked only 4 mentions of Azure Synapse Analytics. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Azure Synapse Analytics mentions (4)

  • DbVisualizer 24.2: A Complete Review
    Azure Synapse Analytics: DbVisualizer now has extended support for dedicated and serverless SQL pools in Azure Synapse Analytics. That includes support for database-scoped credentials, external file formats and data sources, and external tables. For more information, see the Azure Synapse Dedicated and Azure Synapse Serverless pages on the official site. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Deploying a Data Warehouse with Pulumi and Amazon Redshift
    A data warehouse is a specialized database that's purpose built for gathering and analyzing data. Unlike general-purpose databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL, which are designed to meet the real-time performance and transactional needs of applications, a data warehouse is designed to collect and process the data produced by those applications, collectively and over time, to help you gain insight from it. Examples of... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • [WSJ] Facebook Parent Meta Expected to Post Slowest Revenue Growth Since IPO
    You don't run into these kinds of problems with other tools, like the ones I mentioned. I've never tried the Azure ones, but my gut says they may have some scaling issues (synapse analytics looks promising but I have no experience with it). Source: about 3 years ago
  • The Difference Between Data Warehouses, Data Lakes, and Data Lakehouses.
    Popular managed cloud data warehouse solutions include Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure SQL Database, and Amazon Redshift. - Source: dev.to / about 3 years ago

Amazon SageMaker mentions (44)

  • Dashboard for Researchers & Geneticists: Functional Requirements [System Design]
    Leverage Amazon SageMaker: For machine learning (ML) tasks, users can leverage Amazon SageMaker to analyze large datasets and build predictive models. - Source: dev.to / 15 days ago
  • Address Common Machine Learning Challenges With Managed MLflow
    MLflow, an Apache 2.0-licensed open-source platform, addresses these issues by providing tools and APIs for tracking experiments, logging parameters, recording metrics and managing model versions. It also helps to address common machine learning challenges, including efficiently tracking, managing, deploying ML models and enhancing workflows across different ML tasks. Amazon SageMaker with MLflow offers secure... - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • How I suffered my first burnout as software developer
    Our first task for the client was to evaluate various MLOps solutions available on the market. Over the summer of 2022, we conducted small proofs-of-concept with platforms like Amazon SageMaker, Iguazio (the developer of MLRun), and Valohai. However, because we weren’t collaborating directly with the teams we were supposed to support, these proofs-of-concept were limited. Instead of using real datasets or models... - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • 👋🏻Goodbye Power BI! 📊 In 2025 Build AI/ML Dashboards Entirely Within Python 🤖
    Taipy’s ecosystem doesn’t stop at dashboards. With Taipy you can orchestrate data workflows and create advanced user interfaces. Besides, the platform supports every stage of building enterprise-grade applications. Additionally, Taipy’s integration with leading platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake, IBM WatsonX, and Amazon SageMaker ensures compatibility with your existing data infrastructure. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Understanding the MLOps Lifecycle
    Based on your technological stack, various services are used to deploy machine learning models. Some popular services are AWS Sagemaker, Azure Machine Learning, Vertex AI, and many others. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Azure Synapse Analytics and Amazon SageMaker, you can also consider the following products

Google BigQuery - A fully managed data warehouse for large-scale data analytics.

IBM Watson Studio - Learn more about Watson Studio. Increase productivity by giving your team a single environment to work with the best of open source and IBM software, to build and deploy an AI solution.

Databricks Unified Analytics Platform - One platform for accelerating data-driven innovation across data engineering, data science & business analytics

TensorFlow - TensorFlow is an open-source machine learning framework designed and published by Google. It tracks data flow graphs over time. Nodes in the data flow graphs represent machine learning algorithms. Read more about TensorFlow.

Saturn Cloud - ML in the cloud. Loved by Data Scientists, Control for IT. Advance your business's ML capabilities through the entire experiment tracking lifecycle. Available on multiple clouds: AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI.

Azure Machine Learning Studio - Azure Machine Learning Studio is a GUI-based integrated development environment for constructing and operationalizing Machine Learning workflow on Azure.