Infrastructure & Operations › Cloud Computing
AWS, GCP and Azure
The three biggest cloud providers.
Also known as: AWS, GCP, Azure, hyperscalers
Three companies dominate public cloud: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure. All three rent the same basic building blocks: virtual machines, storage, managed databases, networking, and many higher-level services on top. Smaller providers and specialist platforms exist too.
| Building block | AWS | GCP | Azure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Virtual machines | EC2 | Compute Engine | Virtual Machines |
| Object storage | S3 | Cloud Storage | Blob Storage |
| Serverless functions | Lambda | Cloud Functions | Functions |
| Managed Kubernetes | EKS | GKE | AKS |
| Identity and access | IAM | Cloud IAM | Microsoft Entra ID plus Azure RBAC |
(Product names and lineups change over time, so check the provider’s documentation.)
What carries over between them
The concepts transfer even though the names differ: regions and availability zones, IAM roles and policies, virtual networks, object storage, managed databases. Learn the ideas on one provider, and the second takes a fraction of the time.
How to choose, as an engineer
Most of the time you don’t: your company already picked one, often for reasons like existing contracts, a Microsoft-heavy environment, or a specific service. For a new project, familiarity and the team’s existing skills usually matter more than small feature differences.
Mistakes to avoid
- Leaving things running. Cloud is pay-as-you-go. Forgotten test instances and databases keep billing. See FinOps.
- Overusing provider-specific services without noticing the cost of switching later. See vendor lock-in.
- Assuming the provider secures everything. It secures the platform; you secure your configuration and data. See shared responsibility model.