| Projects |
AWS Accounts or Resource Groupings |
GCP organizes resources under Projects (which belong to an Organization). AWS typically uses separate AWS Accounts or Resource Groups. |
| Organizations |
AWS Organizations |
Both allow you to manage multiple accounts (or projects) under a single umbrella for consolidated billing and governance. |
| Folders |
No direct 1:1 (Closest: AWS Organizations’ Organizational Units) |
GCP Folders offer deeper hierarchical grouping. AWS OU (Organizational Units) can group accounts, but doesn’t match the nested folder structure exactly inside a single account. |
| Service Accounts |
IAM Roles / IAM Users |
GCP recommends Service Accounts for apps/services. In AWS, roles or specialized IAM users can serve a similar purpose. |
| Identity and Access Management (IAM) |
AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) |
Both define roles, permissions, policies, etc. Terminology and exact features differ, but the purpose is the same. |
| VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) |
Amazon VPC |
Both define isolated networks, subnets, routing, and firewalls/security groups. |
| VPC Peering |
VPC Peering |
Fairly similar in both platforms—lets you connect separate VPCs using private IP addresses. |
| Cloud VPN |
AWS Site-to-Site VPN |
Managed VPN service to connect on-premises or other clouds to your AWS or GCP environment. |
| Cloud Interconnect |
AWS Direct Connect |
Both provide dedicated, private network connections between on-prem data centers and the cloud. |
| Cloud Load Balancing |
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) |
Both have multiple load balancer types (HTTP(S), TCP, UDP, internal, external). GCP’s global load balancers are “global” by default, whereas AWS typically has regional or external ALBs/NLBs. |
| Cloud CDN |
Amazon CloudFront |
Both provide global content caching. |
| Cloud DNS |
Amazon Route 53 |
Both are scalable DNS services. |
| Compute Engine (VMs) |
Amazon EC2 |
Both provide virtual machines. Pricing, available machine types, and default local disk configurations differ. |
| Persistent Disk (PD) |
Amazon EBS |
Block-level storage for VMs. Similar concepts (provisioned SSD/HDD). |
| Local SSD |
Instance Store |
Direct-attached ephemeral storage on the physical host. Data typically not preserved through instance shutdown. |
| App Engine |
AWS Elastic Beanstalk |
Both offer PaaS for running web apps. GCP App Engine is more fully managed in terms of scaling and certain language runtimes; Elastic Beanstalk has more customization for underlying infrastructure. |
| Cloud Functions |
AWS Lambda |
Serverless functions. Both integrate with many other services and event sources. Pricing and cold start behavior differ slightly. |
| Cloud Run |
AWS Fargate (with ECS/EKS) |
Serverless container compute. In AWS, you typically run containers on ECS or EKS with Fargate as the serverless compute engine. |
| Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) |
Amazon EKS |
Managed Kubernetes. Both abstract away control plane management. Some differences in networking and add-on integrations. |
| Anthos |
AWS Outposts / EKS Anywhere |
Anthos extends GKE and GCP services to on-prem or multi-cloud (including AWS). AWS Outposts extends AWS services to on-prem; EKS Anywhere can run Kubernetes clusters outside AWS. |
| Cloud Build |
AWS CodeBuild |
Both are fully managed CI build services. Cloud Build integrates with GCR/Artifact Registry; CodeBuild integrates with ECR/CodeCommit. |
| Cloud Deploy |
AWS CodeDeploy |
Automated application deployment. AWS CodeDeploy can deploy to EC2, Fargate, Lambda, or on-prem. Cloud Deploy focuses on GKE and Cloud Run deployments. |
| Artifact Registry / Container Registry |
Amazon ECR / AWS CodeArtifact |
GCP Container Registry is for container images; Artifact Registry can host multiple artifact types. AWS has ECR for container images and CodeArtifact for generic artifacts. |
| Cloud Storage (GCS) |
Amazon S3 |
Both are object storage services. APIs and consistency models differ slightly, but overall very similar. |
| Filestore |
Amazon EFS |
Managed NFS file systems. Both allow attaching file shares to instances. |
| Cloud SQL |
Amazon RDS |
Managed relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server). Both differ in configuration, scaling limits, and supported features. |
| Cloud Spanner |
No direct 1:1 (closest: Amazon Aurora for relational) |
Cloud Spanner is globally distributed, horizontally scalable relational DB with strong consistency. Aurora is a managed relational DB with some scaling features but not fully the same global, multi-region approach. |
| Bigtable |
Amazon DynamoDB (NoSQL) or Amazon Keyspaces (for Cassandra) |
Bigtable is a wide-column NoSQL database (HBase style). DynamoDB is key-value store with global tables. They differ in data model and usage patterns, but both are NoSQL. |
| Firestore / Datastore |
Amazon DynamoDB |
Firestore/Datastore is a document store. DynamoDB is key-value with document support. They serve similar roles, but have different query models. |
| BigQuery |
Amazon Redshift / Amazon Athena |
BigQuery is a serverless, auto-scaling data warehouse with built-in query engine. Redshift is a cluster-based data warehouse, while Athena is serverless but queries data in S3. |
| Dataproc |
Amazon EMR |
Managed Hadoop/Spark clusters. Both let you run big data processing on managed clusters. |
| Dataflow |
AWS Glue (ETL) / AWS Data Pipeline / Kinesis Data Analytics |
Dataflow is a fully managed stream/batch data processing service based on Apache Beam. AWS has multiple overlapping tools (Glue, Data Pipeline, etc.) for ETL and real-time data transformations. |
| Pub/Sub |
Combination of Amazon SNS and Amazon SQS |
Pub/Sub is a unified messaging bus with push/pull. AWS typically splits pub/sub (SNS) from queue-based (SQS). |
| Data Catalog |
AWS Glue Data Catalog |
Managed metadata catalog for data in the cloud. Very similar concepts. |
| Dataprep |
AWS Glue DataBrew |
Interactive data preparation and cleaning. |
| Cloud Composer |
Amazon MWAA (Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow) |
Both are managed Airflow. GCP’s version is Composer; AWS’s version is MWAA. |
| Operations Suite (Stackdriver) |
Amazon CloudWatch + AWS X-Ray |
Stackdriver includes logging, monitoring, tracing, error reporting. AWS typically splits these into separate services under the CloudWatch umbrella plus X-Ray for tracing. |
| Cloud Logging |
Amazon CloudWatch Logs |
Centralized log storage and management. |
| Cloud Monitoring |
Amazon CloudWatch Metrics |
Metrics collection, dashboards, and alerts. |
| Cloud Trace |
AWS X-Ray |
Distributed tracing for applications. |
| Error Reporting |
AWS X-Ray (partially) or CloudWatch Alarms |
GCP’s Error Reporting is a dedicated interface for error grouping and aggregation. AWS X-Ray can help track exceptions, but the features differ. |
| Cloud Run for Anthos |
Amazon EKS (with Fargate) |
Serverless container platform but running on Anthos (Kubernetes) that extends across environments. AWS EKS also runs containers but is not exactly the same approach. |
| Secret Manager |
AWS Secrets Manager |
Both securely store API keys, passwords, etc. Pricing and rotation features differ slightly. |
| Cloud KMS |
AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) |
Both handle encryption keys, integration with storage, rotation, etc. |
| Cloud Armor |
AWS WAF / AWS Shield |
Protects apps from DDoS and web attacks. AWS WAF + Shield is a similar combination. |
| Cloud DLP |
Amazon Macie (for S3) / partial coverage from Comprehend |
GCP’s DLP scans data for sensitive info in many services. AWS Macie focuses on S3 data. |
| Security Command Center |
AWS Security Hub |
Security Command Center is a single pane for GCP security findings. AWS Security Hub aggregates findings from GuardDuty, Inspector, Macie, etc. |
| Cloud IAM Workload Identity Federation |
AWS IAM Federation |
Federation from external identity providers. AWS IAM allows SAML and OIDC federation. |
| Cloud Identity |
AWS IAM Identity Center (formerly AWS SSO) |
GCP Cloud Identity manages users and groups across Google services. AWS IAM Identity Center provides SSO across multiple AWS accounts. |
| Resource Manager / Cloud Asset Inventory |
AWS Resource Access Manager + AWS Config (partial) |
GCP Resource Manager controls project/folder/organization structure; Cloud Asset Inventory gives a searchable asset database. AWS has partial equivalents with Resource Access Manager and Config, but not a direct 1:1. |
| Workflows |
AWS Step Functions |
Both are orchestration services that let you define workflows with states, tasks, and transitions. |
| Datastream |
AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) |
Change data capture (CDC) and replication. |
| API Gateway (GCP) |
Amazon API Gateway |
Managed gateway for your APIs. Features (like gRPC support) vary slightly. |
| Cloud Endpoints |
Amazon API Gateway |
Another GCP product for API management using ESP/ESPv2. |
| Apigee |
Amazon API Gateway (partial) or 3rd party |
Apigee is a full API management platform with developer portals, analytics, etc. AWS API Gateway is simpler, focusing on API publishing and routing. |
| Service Directory |
AWS Cloud Map |
Both store and look up service endpoints. |
| Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) |
No direct single service (combination of Cognito + ALB Auth + IAM) |
GCP’s IAP controls access to cloud apps, using identity-based restrictions. AWS can approximate this with Cognito for authentication and ALB-based authentication, but it’s not exactly the same. |
| Transfer Appliance |
AWS Snowball / Snowmobile |
Physical devices to transfer large volumes of data. |
| Vertex AI |
Amazon SageMaker |
Managed machine learning platform. Feature sets and integration points differ, but overall concept is similar. |
| Vision AI |
Amazon Rekognition (Images) |
Both offer image analysis (labeling, face detection, etc.). |
| Video Intelligence |
Amazon Rekognition Video |
Video annotation services. |
| Speech-to-Text |
Amazon Transcribe |
Speech recognition. Language coverage and model tuning can differ. |
| Text-to-Speech |
Amazon Polly |
Both convert text to natural-sounding speech. |
| Cloud Natural Language |
Amazon Comprehend |
NLP capabilities like sentiment analysis and entity detection. |
| Dialogflow |
Amazon Lex |
Both are chatbot-building frameworks using NLP. |
| AutoML Tables |
SageMaker Autopilot |
Automated machine learning pipeline. |
| IoT Core |
AWS IoT Core |
Both manage IoT device connections, messaging, and telemetry. |
