Reference // AWS · Azure · Google Cloud
Every concept in the course, matched to the AWS, Azure and Google Cloud services that provide it. Search, filter by category, or translate a service you know into the other two clouds.
Service names and descriptions were checked against each vendor’s documentation in November 2026. Recent changes are reflected: Azure Managed Redis replaces Azure Cache for Redis, Amazon Pinpoint has ended (push now runs through AWS End User Messaging), and AWS App Mesh has been retired.
30 of 30 concepts
Rent virtual servers by the second; you choose CPU, memory and operating system.
Rent Windows or Linux virtual servers in Azure data centers.
Google's virtual machines, from tiny shared-core to very large memory machines.
Run a function on demand without managing any server; you pay per request and run time.
Run event-triggered code without managing servers.
Event-driven functions (formerly Cloud Functions) that run on Cloud Run.
A group of identical EC2 instances built from one launch template, kept at the size you set.
A group of identical VMs you can grow or shrink together.
Identical Compute Engine VMs created from one instance template, with auto-healing.
Adds or removes EC2 instances based on metrics like CPU or request count, or on a schedule.
Runs containers without servers; you scale the number of tasks and AWS finds the capacity.
Scales Virtual Machine Scale Sets and App Service plans on metrics or schedules.
Serverless containers that scale on HTTP traffic or events, down to zero.
Grows and shrinks a managed instance group on CPU, load-balancer usage or custom metrics.
Runs containers that scale automatically with requests, including to zero.
AWS's own container orchestrator; runs on EC2 or serverless with Fargate.
Managed Kubernetes.
Managed Kubernetes.
Serverless containers for microservices, with built-in service discovery and scaling.
Managed Kubernetes, including a hands-off Autopilot mode.
Runs containers without managing clusters; scales with requests.
A registry of your services and their addresses, queried by name over DNS or API.
Lets ECS services call each other by name, with retries and metrics; the replacement for App Mesh on ECS.
Kubernetes gives every service a stable DNS name inside the cluster.
Apps in the same environment reach each other by app name.
A managed registry for looking up services by name across environments.
Managed service mesh for traffic management, security and telemetry between services.
Managed DNS that can also route by latency, location or health.
Host your DNS zones on Azure's global name servers.
DNS-based traffic routing across regions, by priority, performance or location.
Google's managed, low-latency authoritative DNS.
Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS) load balancer that can route by path, host name or header. Part of Elastic Load Balancing.
Layer 4 (TCP/UDP) load balancer for very high throughput and static IP addresses.
Sends traffic through third-party network appliances such as firewalls.
Layer 4 load balancer for TCP and UDP traffic within a region.
Regional Layer 7 load balancer with path-based routing and an optional web application firewall.
Global Layer 7 entry point that combines load balancing, CDN caching and a firewall at the edge.
Layer 7 load balancer for HTTP/HTTPS, available as global or regional, external or internal.
Layer 4 load balancer, in proxy (can terminate TLS) or passthrough (keeps client IPs, supports UDP) modes.
Global CDN that caches content at edge locations close to users.
Microsoft's global CDN and Layer 7 entry point; replaces the retiring Azure CDN (classic).
DNS answers change automatically when a region's health check fails.
Two static anycast IPs that route users over AWS's network to the nearest healthy region.
Global entry point that sends users to the nearest healthy backend region.
DNS-based failover and routing between regions.
One anycast IP that serves users from backends in many regions and fails over automatically.
Geolocation, weighted and failover DNS answers with health checks.
Publish REST, HTTP and WebSocket APIs with auth, throttling and request routing.
A gateway plus developer portal for publishing, securing and rate-limiting APIs.
A managed gateway for APIs backed by Cloud Run, Cloud Run functions or App Engine.
Google's full API management platform, with analytics, quotas and monetization.
Blocks or counts requests from an IP or key once it passes a request rate you set.
Token-bucket limits per API, stage or client usage plan.
Limit calls per key or subscription over a time window, or set long-term quotas.
Rate-limit rules on Front Door or Application Gateway's firewall.
Throttle or temporarily ban clients that exceed a request rate at the load balancer.
Policies that cap calls per developer or app and smooth sudden bursts.
Managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQL Server, Oracle and Db2.
AWS's MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible database with storage replicated across three zones.
Managed SQL Server database engine.
Managed PostgreSQL (flexible server).
Managed PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQL Server.
Google's PostgreSQL-compatible database tuned for heavy transactional and analytical work.
Serverless key-value and document database with single-digit-millisecond reads at any scale.
MongoDB-compatible document database.
Graph database for highly connected data like social graphs and fraud rings.
Globally distributed NoSQL database with document, key-value, graph and column-family APIs.
Splits tables into partitions by partition key automatically; your key choice decides hotspots.
Serverless, Cassandra-compatible database.
Every container is partitioned by a partition key you choose; partitions spread automatically.
Managed open-source Cassandra clusters.
One primary region with read-only copies in other regions, usually under a second behind.
Multi-region, multi-writer tables; replicas converge with last-writer-wins.
Replicate to any region, optionally write everywhere, and pick one of five consistency levels.
Readable secondary databases in other regions with manual or automatic failover.
Globally distributed relational database with strong consistency across regions.
Read-only copies of a Cloud SQL instance in another region, promotable on disaster.
Stores any amount of files as objects in buckets, with storage classes from frequent access to deep archive.
Object storage with hot, cool, cold and archive tiers.
Object storage with Standard, Nearline, Coldline and Archive classes.
Managed Valkey, Redis OSS or Memcached, as a serverless cache or a cluster of nodes you size.
A cache that sits in front of DynamoDB and answers repeat reads in microseconds.
Microsoft's managed Redis service, the replacement for the retiring Azure Cache for Redis.
Managed Valkey (an open-source Redis fork) with automatic failover across zones.
Managed, horizontally scalable Redis with a 99.99% availability SLA.
A fast shared store for session data with expiry (TTL) on each key.
Durable key-value store; its TTL feature deletes expired sessions automatically.
Shared in-memory session store.
Durable session store with per-item time to live.
Shared in-memory session store.
Durable document store with TTL policies for expiring sessions.
Fully managed message queue; standard (at-least-once) or FIFO (ordered, exactly-once processing).
Pub/sub topics that fan a message out to queues, functions, HTTP endpoints, email or SMS.
Managed ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ brokers for apps that already use them.
Enterprise message broker with queues, topics, sessions and dead-lettering.
Simple, cheap queues inside a storage account.
Global messaging with topics and push or pull subscriptions.
Queues of individual tasks dispatched to HTTP handlers, with rate limits and retries.
Ordered, replayable stream split into shards.
Managed Apache Kafka.
High-throughput event stream with partitions; also speaks the Kafka protocol.
Managed Apache Kafka clusters.
Serverless messaging that can also replay retained messages and deliver them in order per key.
An event bus that routes events from AWS services, SaaS apps and your code to targets by rule.
Routes events from Azure services and your apps to handlers, by topic and filter.
Routes events from Google Cloud services and your apps to Cloud Run and other targets.
Orchestrates steps as a state machine with built-in retries, backoff and error handling.
Runs controlled experiments that break things on purpose to test your recovery.
Write long-running workflows in code; state, retries and checkpoints are handled for you.
Injects faults like VM shutdowns and network latency to test resilience.
Orchestrates service calls with retry policies and error handling.
Retries failed HTTP tasks with configurable exponential backoff.
Sends push notifications to iOS, Android and other devices through their platform services.
SMS, voice and push APIs (formerly Pinpoint's channels; Pinpoint itself ended Oct 30, 2026).
Sends push notifications to any platform from one API, at scale.
APIs for email, SMS, chat and calling.
Free cross-platform push messaging for Android, iOS and web.
Metrics, logs, alarms and dashboards for AWS resources and your apps.
Distributed tracing. AWS now recommends OpenTelemetry instrumentation; the X-Ray SDKs are in maintenance mode.
Collects metrics and logs from Azure resources, with alerts and dashboards.
Application performance monitoring and distributed tracing, built on OpenTelemetry.
Metrics, uptime checks, dashboards and alerting.
Stores, searches and analyzes logs.
Distributed tracing for latency analysis.
Who and what can call which AWS APIs, through users, roles and policies.
Sign-up, sign-in and tokens (OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect) for your app's users.
Microsoft's identity service for employees and Azure access (formerly Azure Active Directory).
Sign-in for your app's customers; the successor to Azure AD B2C for new projects.
Roles and permissions for who can do what on Google Cloud resources.
Customer sign-in with email, phone and social providers, built on Firebase Authentication.
Create and control encryption keys used to encrypt data at rest.
Store and rotate database passwords, API keys and other secrets.
Free public TLS certificates for AWS load balancers and CloudFront, renewed automatically.
Keys, secrets and certificates in one managed vault.
Managed encryption keys, including hardware-backed keys.
Store and version API keys, passwords and certificates.
Provision and renew TLS certificates for Google Cloud load balancers.
Maps, geocoding, routing, tracking and geofences.
Maps, search, routing, traffic and geolocation APIs.
Maps, routes and places APIs.
Build a cost estimate for an architecture before you deploy it.
Estimate monthly costs for Azure services.
Estimate costs for Google Cloud services.
Reference architectures, the Well-Architected Framework and design patterns.
Reference architectures, cloud design patterns and the Well-Architected Framework.
Reference architectures and the Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework.
Three case studies from the course, drawn once for each cloud. Switch tabs to see the same design built with each provider’s services.