The Big Three, Compared

This chapter builds the single habit the rest of this course leans on constantly: mapping the same underlying concept across AWS, Azure, and GCP's three different sets of names for it.

Why Terminology Mapping Matters for Support Work

A support engineer doesn't get to pick which cloud a given customer or team happens to run on. The good news: the underlying concepts across all three major providers are remarkably similar — a virtual machine is a virtual machine everywhere. The friction is almost entirely in the naming. Being able to quickly translate "this sounds like an EC2 problem" into the Azure or GCP equivalent, without re-learning the concept from scratch each time, is a genuinely practical skill this chapter is built around.

Market Landscape & History

• AWS — launched 2006 (S3, EC2), the first mover, and still the largest by market share today.
• Azure — launched 2010, with especially deep integration into the Microsoft enterprise ecosystem (Active Directory, Microsoft 365), a major draw for organizations already invested there.
• GCP — launched 2008 (App Engine) and ramped up significantly after 2011, with particular strength in data/ML tooling — and, notably, GCP is where Kubernetes itself originated internally before Google open-sourced it.

Rough market share ordering is AWS > Azure > GCP, but that ranking isn't the whole story — plenty of organizations use more than one provider, and "market leader" doesn't mean "the only one worth knowing."

The Core Terminology Map

The single most useful practical artifact in this chapter — worth bookmarking and referring back to throughout the rest of this course:

Structural Differences Worth Knowing

Naming isn't the only difference — a few structural ones genuinely matter for finding your way around:

• Regions & zones — all three organize physical infrastructure into regions (geographic areas) containing multiple availability zones or zones (isolated data centers within that region). AWS has the largest region count historically; GCP has been expanding rapidly to close that gap.
• Resource organization hierarchy — AWS uses Organizations → Accounts; Azure uses Management Groups → Subscriptions → Resource Groups; GCP uses Organizations → Folders → Projects. Azure's Resource Group concept — a container for grouping related resources by lifecycle, deleted together — has no clean 1:1 equivalent on AWS or GCP, which matters practically: "where do I even look for this resource" genuinely differs by provider, not just what it's called once you find it.

Free Tiers & Getting Hands-On

All three providers offer a free tier or trial credit for learning and experimentation — the AWS Free Tier, an Azure free account, and GCP's free trial credit. Genuinely practical advice for a support role: having a sandbox account on all three, and actually poking around in each console directly, builds far more real intuition than reading terminology tables alone.

Certifications, Briefly

Each provider runs its own certification track — AWS Certified, Microsoft Azure certifications, and Google Cloud certifications — which some support roles value or explicitly require. This course isn't a certification prep track, but it's worth knowing these exist as a next step once the fundamentals here feel solid.

Hands-On Exercises