Different Names of Services Provided by Public Cloud Providers¶
Learning Goal
Understand that all major cloud providers offer similar services, but each uses different names.
This chapter helps students quickly map services between AWS, Azure, and GCP, so they don’t get confused when switching providers.
🔑 Why this matters¶
- When you move between providers (or read documentation), you’ll encounter different terms for the same concept.
- Knowing this mapping makes it easier to learn once and apply everywhere.
- Example: AWS S3 = Azure Blob Storage = GCP Cloud Storage → all are object storage services.
📊 Service Name Comparison Table¶
| Category | AWS | Azure | GCP |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compute (VMs) | EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) | Virtual Machines | Compute Engine |
| Serverless Functions | Lambda | Azure Functions | Cloud Functions |
| Containers (K8s) | Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) | Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) | Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) |
| Object Storage | S3 (Simple Storage Service) | Blob Storage | Cloud Storage |
| Block Storage | EBS (Elastic Block Store) | Managed Disks | Persistent Disk |
| File Storage | EFS (Elastic File System) | Azure Files | Filestore |
| Relational DB | RDS (Relational Database Service) | Azure SQL Database | Cloud SQL |
| NoSQL DB | DynamoDB | Cosmos DB | Firestore / Bigtable |
| Data Warehouse | Redshift | Synapse Analytics | BigQuery |
| Networking (VPC) | VPC | Virtual Network (VNet) | VPC (same name) |
| Load Balancing | Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) | Azure Load Balancer / App Gateway | Cloud Load Balancing |
| DNS | Route 53 | Azure DNS | Cloud DNS |
| CDN | CloudFront | Azure CDN | Cloud CDN |
| Identity & Access | IAM (Identity & Access Mgmt) | Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) | IAM (same name) |
| Key Management | KMS | Key Vault | Cloud KMS |
| Monitoring & Logging | CloudWatch + CloudTrail | Azure Monitor + Log Analytics | Cloud Monitoring + Logging |
| Serverless Messaging | SQS/SNS/EventBridge | Service Bus / Event Grid | Pub/Sub |
| Big Data / Analytics | EMR (Elastic MapReduce) | HDInsight / Synapse | Dataproc / Dataflow |
| AI/ML | SageMaker | Azure Machine Learning | Vertex AI |
| Migration Tools | Database Migration Service (DMS) | Azure Migrate | Migrate for Compute / Database Migration Service |
| Cost Management | Cost Explorer | Cost Management + Billing | Billing Reports / Cost Tools |
🧭 Key Takeaway¶
- The services are almost the same — what changes is the branding.
- If you know how to use one, learning the equivalent in another provider is much easier.
- Focus on concepts like compute, storage, networking, databases, identity, serverless.