AWS service
Plain English definition
Azure equivalent
Description
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud / EC2
Host the bits of things you think of as a computer
A web service that enables you to launch and manage Linux/UNIX and Windows server instances in Amazon’s data centers.
Virtual Machines (VMs)
Provision Windows and Linux Virtual Machines and applications in minutes
Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Setup additional users, setup new AWS Keys and policies
A web service that enables Amazon Web Services customers to manage users and user permissions within AWS.
Azure Active Directory
Synchronize on-premises directories and enable single sign-on
Amazon Simple Storage Service / S3
Store images and other assets for websites. Keep backups and share files between services. Host static websites. Also, many of the other AWS services write and read from S3.
Storage for the internet. You can use it to store and retrieve any amount of data at any time, from anywhere on the web.
Azure Blob Storage
Durable, highly available and massively scalable cloud storage
Virtual private cloud / VPC
Overcome objections that “all our stuff is on the Internet!” by adding an additional layer of security. Makes it appears as if all of your AWS services are on the same little network instead of being small pieces in a much bigger network
An elastic network populated by infrastructure, platform, and application services that share common security and interconnection.
Azure Virtual Private Network (VPN)
Your private network in the cloud
API Gateway
Proxy your apps API through this so you can throttle bad client traffic, test new versions, and present methods more cleanly.
API Management
Publish APIs to developers, partners and employees securely and at scale
Amazon Relational Database Service / RDS
Be your app’s Mysql, Postgres, Oracle database
A web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost efficient, resizable capacity for an industry standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks.
SQL Database
Managed Relational SQL Database-as-a-service
Route53
Buy a new domain, setup the DNS records for that domain
A web service you can use to create a new DNS service or to migrate your existing DNS service to the cloud.
DNS
Host your DNS domain in Azure
Amazon Simple Email Service / SES
Send one off emails like password resets, notifications, etc. You could use it send Newsletter if you wrote all the code, but that’s not a great idea.
An easy to use, cost effective email solution for applications.
Cloudfront
Make your websites load faster by spreading out static file delivery to be closer to where your users are.
An AWS content delivery service that helps you improve the performance, reliability, and availability of your websites and applications.
CDN
Deliver content to end-users through a robust network of global data centers
CloudSearch
Pull in data on S3 or in RDS and and then search it for every instance of ‘Jimmy’
A fully managed service in the AWS cloud that makes it easy to set up, manage, and scale a search solution for your website or application
Azure Search
Fully-managed search-as-a-service
DynamoDB
Be your app’s MongoDB
DocumentDB
NoSQL database for JSON documents optimized for frequent writes
Elasticache
Be your app’s Memcached or Redis
Redis Cache
High throughput, low latency data access to build fast and scalable applications
Elastic Transcoder
Deal with video weirdness (change formats, compress, etc.)
Media Services
Encode, store, and stream video and audio at scale
Lambda
Run little self contained snippets of JS to do discrete tasks. Sort of a combination of a queue and execution in one. Currently mostly used for storing and then executing changes to your AWS setup. Also, you can put it behind the API Gateway and expose it that way.
Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Store data for future processing in a queue. The lingo for this is storing “messages” but it doesn’t have anything to do with email or SMS. SQS doesn’t have any logic it’s just a place to put things and take things out.
Azure Queue
Cognito
Give end users - (non AWS) - the ability to log in with Google, Facebook, etc.
Device Farm
Test your app on a bunch of different IOS and Android devices simultaneously
Mobile Analytics
Track what people are doing inside of your app
Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Send mobile notifications, emails and/or SMS messages
Notification Hubs
Scalable, cross-platform push notification infrastructure
CodeCommit
Version control your code - hosted Git
Visual Studio Online
Visual Studio Online offers:
- hosted source control system - Team Foundation Service, Git
- load testing service
- support for agile development with features like continuous integration builds, Kanban boards and virtual team rooms.
Code Deploy
Get your code from your CodeCommit repo (or Github) onto a bunch of EC2 instances in a sane way
CodePipeline
Run automated test on your code and then do stuff with it depending on if it passes those tests
EC2 Container Service
Put a Dockerfile into an EC2 instance so you can run a website
Elastic Beanstalk
Move your app hosted on Heroku to AWS when it gets too expensive
AppStream
Put a copy of a Windows application on a windows machine that people get remote access to.
RemoteApp
Deploy Windows client apps in the cloud, run on any device
Direct Connect
Pay your Telco + AWS to get a dedicated leased line from your data center or network to AWS. Cheaper than Internet out for Data.
ExpressRoute
Dedicated private network fiber connections to Azure
Directory Service
Tie together other apps that need a Microsoft Active Directory to control them
Azure AD Domain Services
Your domain controller as a service
WorkDocs
Share Word Docs with your colleagues
WorkMail
Give everyone in your company the same email system and calendar
Workspaces
Gives you a standard windows desktop that you’re remotely controlling
Service Catalog
Give other AWS users in your group access to preset apps you’ve built so they don’t have to read guides like this.
Storage Gateway
Stop buying more storage to keep word docs on. Make automating getting files into S3 from your corporate network easier
StorSimple
Enterprise hybrid cloud storage solution that provides primary storage, backup, archive, integrated data protection, and location-independent disaster recovery
Data Pipeline
Extract, Transform and Load data from elsewhere in AWS. Schedule when it happens and get alerts when they fail
Data Factory
Orchestrate and manage data transformation and movement
Elastic Map Reduce
Iterate over massive text files of raw data that you’re keeping in S3
A web service that makes it easy to process large amounts of data efficiently. Amazon EMR uses Hadoop processing combined with several AWS products to do such tasks as web indexing, data mining, log file analysis, machine learning, scientific simulation, and data warehousing.
HDInsight
Provision managed Hadoop clusters
Glacier
Make backups of your backups that you keep on S3. Also, beware the costs of getting data back out in a hurry. For long term archiving
Backup
Simple and reliable server backup to the cloud
Kinesis
Ingest lots of data very quickly (For things like analytics or people retweeting Kanye) that you then later use other AWS services to analyze
Events Hub
Receive telemetry from millions of devices
RedShift
Store a whole bunch of analytics data, do some processing and dump it out
SQL Data Warehouse
Elastic data warehouse-as-a-service with enterprise-class features
Machine Learning
Predict future behavior from existing data for problems like fraud detection or “people that bought x also bought y”
Azure Machine Learning
Powerful cloud-based predictive analytics
SWF
Build a service of “deciders” and “workers” on top of EC2 to accomplish a set task. Unlike SQS - logic is setup inside the service to determine how and what should happen
CloudFormation
Build a service of “deciders” and “workers” on top of EC2 to accomplish a set task. Unlike SQS - logic is setup inside the service to determine how and what should happen
A service for writing or changing templates that create and delete related AWS resources together as a unit.
CloudTrail
Log who is doing what in your AWS stack (API calls)
CloudWatch
Get alerts about AWS services messing up or disconnecting
A web service that enables you to monitor and manage various metrics, and configure alarm actions based on data from those metrics.
Azure Audit Logs
Includes all the provisioning actions performed in the Azure Resource Manager in addition to other actions related to managing Azure resources (ex. Alerts, AutoScaling, deployments etc).
Config
Keep from going insane if you have a large AWS setup and changes are happening that you want to track.
OpsWorks
Handle running your application with things like auto-scaling
Trusted Advisor
Find out where you’re paying too much in your AWS setup (unused EC2 instances, etc.)
Amazon Elastic File System
Managed service to easily set up and scale shared file storage Share files between applications running in your virtual machines using familiar Windows APIs or file REST API.
Azure Files
a shared file system that supports the standard SMB 2.1 protocol.
EBS
SSD-based storage
Azure Premium Storage
High-performance, low-latency disk support for virtual machines running I/O-intensive workloads
Directory Services
Identity and Access Management
Cloud HSM
Authentication and authorization
Azure Active Directory
Multi-Factor Authentication
Key Vault
CloudFormation
enables declarative provisioning of AWS cloud resources
Azure Resource Manager (ARM) JSON Template
to specify cloud resource definitions in a JSON file so that infrastructure can be deployed as code
References:
List of AWS Products
AWS Glossary
List of Azure Services
Mapping AWS services to those of other cloud providers
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