Stop 01 · Cloud Computing FoundationsTopics · 5/9

Major Cloud Providers Overview (AWS, Azure, GCP)

In short

Job posts ask for AWS, Azure or GCP, and students panic about picking the 'right' one. Good news: the core ideas are the same. Learn one well and the other two get much easier.

AWS has the largest market share and broadest service catalog, Azure dominates in Microsoft-heavy enterprises, and GCP has particular strength in data and ML tooling — the core concepts transfer between all three.

The blob character holds three coloured SIM cards next to a phone.

Think of it like this

Three mobile networks

Whichever SIM you put in, calls, data and SMS work the same way. Only plan names, prices and coverage differ. Cloud providers are like that: same building blocks, different names on the menu.

Watch it happen

Same idea, three names

Virtual machine

Object storage

Managed SQL

Functions

Kubernetes

1/4These five building blocks exist on every major cloud. Learn the idea first.

The big ideas

What you need to know

AWS: the biggest catalogue

Oldest of the three and the most services. Most common in startup and product company job posts.

Azure: big in enterprises

Strong where companies already use Microsoft tools like Active Directory, Office 365 and .NET.

GCP: data and ML strength

Known for BigQuery, Kubernetes roots and AI tooling. Popular with data-heavy teams.

Skills transfer

VMs, networks, storage, IAM and databases work almost the same everywhere. Only names and buttons change.

See it in code

A tiny example

bash

1# Create a storage bucket on each cloud2aws s3 mb s3://my-notes-2026-xyz3gcloud storage buckets create gs://my-notes-2026-xyz4az storage container create --name notes --account-name mystorageacct

Three CLIs, one idea. Bucket names must be globally unique, so add your own suffix. Azure puts containers inside a storage account you create first.

Save yourself the pain

Common mistakes

Oops

Spending weeks deciding which cloud to learn first.

Do this instead

Check job posts in the city or companies you want, pick the most common one, and start. Switching later is easy.

Oops

Memorising service names without the idea behind them.

Do this instead

Learn 'object storage' as a concept, then map S3, Blob and Cloud Storage onto it.

Your mission

Build your own translation table

~25 min

Quick check

You learnt AWS S3 well. Your new company uses Azure. What's the smartest first step?

Go deeper

1Sign up for free-tier accounts on at least AWS to explore hands-on throughout this roadmap.
2Compare each provider's console layout and service naming conventions.
3Learn to map a concept learned on one provider to its equivalent on the others.