AWS in Plain English
Azure and AWS Analogs
Folks familiar with AWS who are learning Azure or who are familiar with Azure and learning AWS commonly find it challenging to map terminology from one service to the other. This page provides a mapping between services and names of resource types from each vendor. We include only the most commonly used services and terms.
For a more complete mapping between Azure and AWS Services see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/aws-professional/services
Services
| Azure | AWS | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Azure Virtual Machines | Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) | Virtual machines in the cloud |
| Azure Backup | AWS Backup | Back up and recovery |
| SQL Database Azure Database for MySQL Azure Database for PostgreSQL | Relational Database Service (RDS) | Relational databases as a service |
| Azure Container Instances | EC2 Container Service (ECS) Fargate | Run Docker containers |
| Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) | Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) | Run Docker containers on Kubernetes |
| Azure Functions | Lambda | Serverless computing |
| Azure Blob storage | Simple Storage Services (S3) | Object storage |
| ExpressRoute | Direct Connect | Dedicated connection to on-premises networks |
| Route 53 | DNS as a service | |
| Identity and Access Management (IAM) | Security principals and permissions |
Resource Type Names
| Azure | AWS | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Virtual Network (VNet) | Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) | Cloud virtual networking |
| Subnets | Subnets | Virtual network segmentation |
| Network traffic filtering | ||
| Load Balancer | Network Load Balancer | Load-balancing traffic at layer 4 |
| Application Gateway | Application Load Balancer | Load balancing traffic at layer 7 |
| Azure managed disks | Elastic Block Store (EBS) | Virtual server disks |
| Azure Files | Managed NFS and CIFS file systems |