Cloud Services Overview
In the market, we have several clouds available, some with a wider variety of services and others more focused.
Most cloud certifications end up directing learning toward knowing the available services and how to offer them to customers. In the end, we often feel more like salespeople than technicians. However, there are essential services that we will inevitably use, such as virtual machines, load balancers, storage, among others. If we're working in the cloud, it's inevitable that we'll use the services it offers.
Regardless of which cloud you choose or are using, most of them offer a set of fundamental services that are widely used.
Here, the goal is to present the main types of services that clouds provide, highlighting those you'll need to learn first.
The idea is not to teach how to configure these services, but rather when and why to use them. Each cloud has its peculiarities and implementation forms, but the focus here is not to delve into how to create them on a specific platform, but rather to understand their applicability and importance.
It's worth remembering that cloud services may or may not be viable in terms of price, and pricing changes in each cloud, so we won't focus on that.
I'll list here what I believe are the main ones:
| Category | Subcategory | GCP | AWS | Azure |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Compute | Virtual Machines | Compute Engine | EC2 | Virtual Machines |
| Containers | Kubernetes Engine (GKE) | ECS/EKS | AKS | |
| Serverless | Cloud Functions | Lambda | Azure Functions | |
| Managed Containers | Cloud Run | Fargate | Azure Container Instances | |
| Storage | Object | Cloud Storage | S3 | Blob Storage |
| File | Filestore | EFS | Azure Files | |
| Block | Persistent Disk | EBS | Disk Storage | |
| Container Registry | GCR | ECR | ACR | |
| Databases | Relational | Cloud SQL | RDS | Azure SQL Database |
| Non-relational | Firestore/Bigtable | DynamoDB | CosmosDB | |
| Analytics | BigQuery | Redshift | Azure Synapse Analytics | |
| Network | CDN | Cloud CDN | CloudFront | Azure CDN |
| Load Balancer | Cloud Load Balancing | Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) | Azure Load Balancer | |
| Application Load Balancer | - | Application Load Balancer (ALB) | Application Gateway | |
| DNS | Cloud DNS | Route 53 | Azure DNS | |
| API Gateway | API Gateway | API Gateway | API Management | |
| Virtual Private Network | Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) | VPC | Azure Virtual Network (VNet) | |
| Security | IAM | Google IAM | AWS IAM | Azure AD |
| Key Management | Cloud KMS | AWS KMS | Azure Key Vault | |
| Firewall and WAF | Cloud Armor | AWS WAF | Azure Firewall | |
| Identity and SSO | Identity Platform | Cognito | Azure AD B2C | |
| Monitoring | Monitoring | Cloud Monitoring | CloudWatch | Azure Monitor |
| Logging | Cloud Logging | CloudTrail | Log Analytics | |
| DevOps Tools | CI/CD | Cloud Build | CodePipeline | Azure DevOps |
| Code Repositories | Source Repositories | CodeCommit | Azure Repos | |
| IaC Management | Deployment Manager | CloudFormation | Azure Resource Manager (ARM) | |
| AI/ML and Big Data | Machine Learning | Vertex AI | SageMaker | Azure Machine Learning |
| Data Processing | Dataflow | EMR | Data Lake Analytics | |
| Messaging | Queue | Pub/Sub | SQS | Service Bus |
| Data Streaming | Pub/Sub | Kinesis | Event Hub |
We'll find many services beyond these. Every day something new comes out to offer, after all the function of the cloud is to make our lives easier and make money from it. However, we need to weigh whether the cost is worth the service and/or effort to create something self-hosted.