Cloud service map
Every cloud provider offers the same building blocks under different names. Search by capability or by any service name to find its equivalents. The last column lists an open-source or portable option you can run anywhere, which is useful when you want to limit lock-in.
46 capabilities
| Capability | AWS | Azure | Google Cloud | Open source or portable |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Compute | ||||
| Virtual machines | Amazon EC2 | Azure Virtual Machines | Compute Engine | OpenStack, KVM |
| Managed Kubernetes | Amazon EKS | Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) | Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) | Kubernetes |
| Serverless containers | AWS Fargate (with ECS or EKS) | Azure Container Apps | Cloud Run | Knative |
| Functions | AWS Lambda | Azure Functions | Cloud Run functions (formerly Cloud Functions) | Knative, OpenFaaS |
| Container registry | Amazon ECR | Azure Container Registry | Artifact Registry | Harbor |
| Storage | ||||
| Object storage | Amazon S3 | Azure Blob Storage | Cloud Storage | Ceph, SeaweedFS |
| Block storage | Amazon EBS | Azure Managed Disks | Persistent Disk, Hyperdisk | Ceph |
| Shared file storage | Amazon EFS, Amazon FSx | Azure Files | Filestore | NFS, CephFS |
| Archive storage | Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes | Blob Storage archive tier | Cloud Storage Archive class | — |
| Databases | ||||
| Managed PostgreSQL and MySQL | Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora | Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure Database for MySQL | Cloud SQL, AlloyDB for PostgreSQL | PostgreSQL, MySQL |
| Document and key-value NoSQL | Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon DocumentDB | Azure Cosmos DB | Firestore | MongoDB |
| Wide-column NoSQL | Amazon Keyspaces | Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra | Bigtable | Apache Cassandra, ScyllaDB |
| Globally distributed SQLAzure has no direct equivalent; Cosmos DB is the usual choice for multi-region writes. | Amazon Aurora DSQL | — | Spanner | CockroachDB, YugabyteDB |
| In-memory cacheAzure Cache for Redis is being retired in favor of Azure Managed Redis. | Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon MemoryDB | Azure Managed Redis | Memorystore | Valkey, Redis |
| Graph database | Amazon Neptune | Azure Cosmos DB for Apache Gremlin | Spanner Graph | Neo4j, JanusGraph |
| Vector search | Amazon OpenSearch Service, Aurora PostgreSQL with pgvector | Azure AI Search, Azure Database for PostgreSQL with pgvector | Vector Search on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, AlloyDB with pgvector | pgvector, OpenSearch |
| Data and analytics | ||||
| Data warehouse | Amazon Redshift | Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse | BigQuery | ClickHouse |
| Managed Spark | Amazon EMR, AWS Glue | Azure Databricks, Microsoft Fabric | Dataproc | Apache Spark |
| Lakehouse table catalog | AWS Glue Data Catalog, Amazon S3 Tables | Unity Catalog (Azure Databricks), OneLake (Microsoft Fabric) | BigLake metastore | Apache Polaris, Nessie |
| SQL on the data lake | Amazon Athena | Databricks SQL, Microsoft Fabric | BigQuery with BigLake tables | Trino |
| Kafka-compatible event streaming | Amazon MSK | Azure Event Hubs (Kafka protocol) | Managed Service for Apache Kafka | Apache Kafka |
| Stream processing | Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink | Azure Stream Analytics | Dataflow | Apache Flink, Apache Beam |
| Data pipeline orchestration | Amazon MWAA (managed Airflow) | Azure Data Factory | Cloud Composer (managed Airflow) | Apache Airflow, Dagster |
| Business intelligence | Amazon Quick Sight (formerly QuickSight) | Power BI | Looker | Apache Superset |
| Integration | ||||
| Message queue | Amazon SQS | Azure Service Bus queues | Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks | RabbitMQ |
| Publish/subscribe and event routing | Amazon SNS, Amazon EventBridge | Service Bus topics, Azure Event Grid | Pub/Sub, Eventarc | RabbitMQ, NATS |
| API gateway | Amazon API Gateway | Azure API Management | Apigee, API Gateway | Kong |
| Workflow orchestration | AWS Step Functions | Azure Logic Apps, Durable Functions | Workflows | Temporal |
| Networking | ||||
| Content delivery network | Amazon CloudFront | Azure Front Door | Cloud CDN | — |
| DNS | Amazon Route 53 | Azure DNS | Cloud DNS | CoreDNS |
| Load balancing | Elastic Load Balancing | Azure Load Balancer, Application Gateway | Cloud Load Balancing | NGINX, Envoy |
| Private connection to your data center | AWS Direct Connect | Azure ExpressRoute | Cloud Interconnect | — |
| Service-to-service networkingAWS App Mesh is being discontinued; AWS recommends VPC Lattice or ECS Service Connect. | Amazon VPC Lattice, ECS Service Connect | Istio-based service mesh add-on for AKS | Cloud Service Mesh | Istio, Linkerd |
| Security and identity | ||||
| Employee identity and single sign-on | AWS IAM Identity Center | Microsoft Entra ID | Cloud Identity | Keycloak |
| Customer sign-in | Amazon Cognito | Microsoft Entra External ID | Identity Platform | Keycloak |
| Permissions on cloud resources | AWS IAM | Azure role-based access control | IAM | — |
| Secrets | AWS Secrets Manager | Azure Key Vault | Secret Manager | HashiCorp Vault, OpenBao |
| Encryption keys | AWS KMS | Azure Key Vault, Managed HSM | Cloud KMS | — |
| Web application firewall | AWS WAF | Azure Web Application Firewall | Cloud Armor | Coraza, ModSecurity |
| Threat detection | Amazon GuardDuty | Microsoft Defender for Cloud | Security Command Center | Falco |
| Observability | ||||
| Metrics, logs and alerts | Amazon CloudWatch | Azure Monitor | Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging | Prometheus, Grafana, OpenSearch |
| Distributed tracingAWS is ending support for the X-Ray SDKs and daemon and recommends OpenTelemetry for instrumentation. | AWS X-Ray (with OpenTelemetry) | Application Insights | Cloud Trace | OpenTelemetry, Jaeger |
| Delivery | ||||
| Infrastructure as code | AWS CloudFormation, AWS CDK | Bicep, Azure Resource Manager | Infrastructure Manager | Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi |
| Build and deployment pipelines | AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodePipeline | Azure Pipelines | Cloud Build, Cloud Deploy | Jenkins, Tekton, Argo CD |
| AI and machine learning | ||||
| Foundation models through an APIMicrosoft renamed Azure AI Foundry to Microsoft Foundry in 2025; Google renamed Vertex AI in 2026. | Amazon Bedrock | Microsoft Foundry (including Azure OpenAI) | Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (formerly Vertex AI) | Ollama, vLLM |
| Machine learning platform | Amazon SageMaker AI | Azure Machine Learning | Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform | Kubeflow, MLflow |
No services match. Try a shorter search or another category.
Names last checked: November 2026.
To see these services in context, read the cloud mapping sections of the microservices, RAG and lakehouse reference architectures.
Written and edited by Abhinav Taduka, enterprise software architect.