GCP and AWS in plain English

Amazon Web Services (AWS) & Google Cloud Platform (GCP) explained in simple English

This guide is only representative from my point of view and it may not be accurate and you should go on the official AWS & GCP websites for accurate and detailed information. It’s initially inspired by AWS in simple English and GCP for AWS professionals. The idea is to compare both services, give simple one-line explanation and examples with other software that might have similiar capabilities. Comment below for suggestions.

Category Service AWS GCP Description It’s like
Compute IaaS Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Google Compute Engine Type-1 virtual servers VMware ESXi, Citrix XenServer
PaaS AWS Elastic Beanstalk Google App Engine Running your app on a platform Heroku, BlueMix, Modulus
Containers Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Container Service Google Container Engine Run your app inside container instead of server Docker
Compute Service Amazon Lambda Google Cloud Functions Run event-driven code
Network Load Balancer Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) Google Compute Engine Load Balancer Standard load balancing Zen Load Balancer, HaProxy,
Peering Direct Connect Google Cloud Interconnect Dedicated connection DC++
DNS AWS Route 53 Google Cloud DNS Managed DNS Service BIND
Storage Object Storage Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Google Cloud Storage Managed Block Storage with API access OpenStack Block Storage, Ceph Block Storage
Block Storage Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Google Compute Engine Persistent Disks
Cold Storage Amazon Glacier Google Cloud Storage Nearline
File Storage Amazon Elastic File System ZFS / Avere
Database RDBMS Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) Google Cloud SQL Relational database MySQL, Postgres, MSSQL
NoSQL: Key-value Amazon DynamoDB Google Cloud Bigtable Key-value NoSQL database Redis, CouchDB
NoSQL: Indexed Amazon SimpleDB Google Cloud Datastore Indexed NoSQL database Apache Cassandra, MongoDB
Big Data & Analytics Batch Data Processing Amazon Elastic Map Reduce Google Cloud Dataproc, Google Cloud Dataflow
Stream Data Processing Amazon Kinesis Google Cloud Dataflow
Stream Data Ingest Amazon Kinesis Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Analytics Amazon Redshift Google BigQuery
Application Services Messaging Amazon Simple Notification Service Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Data Sync Amazon Cognito Google Firebase
Mobile Backend Amazon Cognito Google Cloud Endpoints, Google Firebase
Management Services Monitoring Amazon CloudWatch Google Cloud Monitoring
Deployment AWS CloudFormation Google Cloud Deployment Manager
Monitoring AWS CloudFormation Google Cloud Deployment Manager
Monitoring AWS CloudFormation
Security SSL Amazon Certificate Manager (ACM) Managed SSL Certificates Let’s encrypt
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