Cloud Services Map: AWS, Azure & Google Cloud
The equivalent building blocks across the three major cloud providers.
Every major cloud offers the same categories of building blocks under different names. Learning the categories once lets you design on any provider.
The table below maps common services. Exact features differ, so check the provider’s documentation for limits and pricing before committing.
Diagram
Key concepts
- IaaS / PaaS / SaaS
- You manage the VM / you manage the app / you just use the software.
- Region & availability zone
- A region is a geographic area; zones are isolated data centres within it. Spread across zones for high availability.
- Shared responsibility
- The provider secures the cloud; you secure what you put in it — identities, data, configuration.
Service comparison
| Category | AWS | Azure | Google Cloud |
|---|---|---|---|
| Virtual machines | EC2 | Virtual Machines | Compute Engine |
| Managed Kubernetes | EKS | AKS | GKE |
| Serverless containers | ECS on Fargate | Container Apps | Cloud Run |
| Functions | Lambda | Azure Functions | Cloud Run functions |
| Object storage | S3 | Blob Storage | Cloud Storage |
| Managed SQL | RDS / Aurora | Azure SQL / Database for PostgreSQL | Cloud SQL / AlloyDB |
| NoSQL document / key-value | DynamoDB | Cosmos DB | Firestore / Bigtable |
| In-memory cache | ElastiCache | Azure Cache for Redis | Memorystore |
| Queue | SQS | Service Bus / Queue Storage | Pub/Sub |
| Event streaming | Kinesis / MSK | Event Hubs | Pub/Sub / Managed Kafka |
| API gateway | API Gateway | API Management | API Gateway / Apigee |
| CDN | CloudFront | Front Door / CDN | Cloud CDN |
| DNS | Route 53 | Azure DNS | Cloud DNS |
| Identity | IAM / IAM Identity Center | Entra ID | Cloud IAM / Identity Platform |
| Secrets | Secrets Manager | Key Vault | Secret Manager |
| Monitoring | CloudWatch | Azure Monitor / App Insights | Cloud Monitoring / Logging |
| Infrastructure as code | CloudFormation / CDK | Bicep / ARM | Infrastructure Manager |
Trade-offs
Benefits
- Managed services remove undifferentiated operational work
- Global reach and elastic capacity
- Pay for what you use
Costs
- Costs grow quietly without budgets and tagging
- Proprietary services increase lock-in
Use it when
- Designing a system and choosing managed building blocks
- Migrating between providers or supporting more than one
Common mistakes
- Lift-and-shift of VMs without using managed services
- No budgets, alerts or cost tags
- Single-zone deployments for production
Interview questions
Q1What is the difference between a region and an availability zone?
A region is a set of data centres in one geography. Availability zones are physically separate data centres inside a region with independent power and networking.
Q2How do you reduce vendor lock-in?
Use open standards at the edges — containers, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, OpenTelemetry, Terraform — and isolate provider-specific services behind your own interfaces where it matters.
Q3Which managed service would you pick for a simple background job queue on Azure?
Azure Service Bus for features like dead-lettering, sessions and duplicate detection, or Queue Storage for a very simple, cheap queue.
Related lessons
Cloud & Delivery
Kubernetes Architecture
The control plane, worker nodes and core objects that run containers at scale.
Scalability & PerformanceVertical vs Horizontal Scaling
Make one machine bigger, or add more machines — the first decision in every scaling story.
Messaging & MicroservicesMessage Brokers: RabbitMQ vs Kafka vs ActiveMQ
Queues and logs for decoupling services — and how the three popular brokers differ.