AWS & Azure Terms Comparison: Comparison of the naming conventions for the different tools used in AWS & Azure

Overall, the public cloud services offered by Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS are similar. However, using the two platforms can be made more complex by virtue of them using different naming conventions for similar services.

We have provided the following list which lists the different Azure and AWS services and the names used for them by the two platforms. For more information about how IG CloudOps can help your organisation take advantage of the cloud, please contact one of our AWS consultants or Azure consultants today.

We also provide our own cloud management software to help manage and extend the cloud platform to give visibility and insight and help automate the management of your cloud infrastructure. Please have a look at CloudOps for more information about unified cloud management.

Compute

Virtual Servers

Your virtual server is used to host applications and data.  Instances can be configured using different combinations of RAM/CPU and are flexible:

Virtual Servers

Your virtual server is used to host applications and data.  Instances can be configured using different combinations of RAM/CPU and are flexible:

Azure Term: Virtual Machines

AWS Term: Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) Instances

Scaling

Scaling allows you to change the number of instances that are required automatically based on application need:

Azure Term: Virtual Machine Scale Sets

AWS Term: Auto Scaling

Storage

Object Storage

This is storage for use cases including cloud applications, disaster recovery, archiving or big data analytics:

Azure Term: Blob Storage

AWS Term: Simple Storage Services (S3)

Virtual Server Disks

This refers to SSDs which have been optimised for intensive read/write usage:

Azure Term: Managed Disks

AWS Term: Elastic Blob Store (EBS)

Shared Files

These tools provide an interface to build file systems quickly and share common files:

Azure Term: Files

AWS Term: Elastic File System

Hybrid Storage

These tools integrate on-premises and cloud environments to automate management and storage as well as supporting disaster recovery:

Azure Term: StorSimple

AWS Term: Storage Gateway

Security

Automated Security Assessment Service

This improves security and compliance of applications and assesses vulnerabilities:

Azure Term: Security Centre

AWS Term: Inspector

Certificate Management

Services that allow for the creation of and management of security certificates in the cloud:

Azure Term: App Service Certificates

AWS Term: Certificate Manager

Threat Protection

Monitoring service to detect and investigate attacks both on premises and in the cloud:

Azure Term: Advanced Threat Protection

AWS Term: GuardDuty

DDoS Protection

This service detects and protects against distributed denial of service attacks on data or applications:

Azure Term: DDoS Protection Service

AWS Term: Shield

Identity management

Access Management

These tools manage access to documents at a user level and allow permissions to be managed at group and individual user level:

Azure Term: Active Directory

AWS Term: Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Customer Access Management

These tools manage access to services for end users in a B2C application

Azure Term: Azure Active Directory B2C

AWS Term: Cognito

Encryption Control

These services allow you to create encryption keys and manage security of information for end users:

Azure Term: Key Vault

AWS Term: CloudHSM, Key Management Services (KSM)

Access Management

These tools manage access to documents at a user level and allow permissions to be managed at group and individual user level:

Azure Term: Active Directory

AWS Term: Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Networking

Cloud virtual networking         

This service gives users control over their virtual networking environment.  It includes the selection of IP range, and configuration of network gateways and subnet creation:

Azure Term: Virtual Network

AWS Term: Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Dedicated network     

With both Amazon and Azure, you can establish a private network from a specific location to the cloud without using the internet:

Azure Term: ExpressRoute

AWS Term: Direct Connect

Load Balancing

Traffic to web applications hosted in either Azure or AWS can be load balanced at layer 4 (TCP or UDP) levels

Azure Term: Load Balancer

AWS Term: Network Load Balancer

Database

Relational Database

A managed relational database.

Azure Term: SQL Database / Database for MySQL / Database for PostgreSQL

AWS Term: RDS

NoSQL

A multi-modal database that supports multiple data models including documents, graphs, columnar, and key value

Azure Term: CosmosDB

AWS Term: DynamoDB / SimpleDB / AmazonDocumentDB

DevOps

Application Monitoring

Solutions that collect data from telemetry on your cloud and on-premises environments for analysis:

Azure Term: Monitor

AWS Term: CloudWatch / X-Ray

Task Automation

Services that provide ways for users to automate the long-running, frequently repeated and error prone IT tasks:

Azure Term: Resource Manager / VM Extensions / Azure Automation

AWS Term: CloudFormation

Management

Billing

Analysis of resource usage by time, process and organisation to generate and monitor budgets which can be used to help reduce Azure costs or AWS costs when analysed. These are extended by our own CloudOps management platform

Azure Term: Billing API

AWS Term: Usage and Billing Report

Service Management

The dashboard for providing managed services and build, deploy and operate resources:

Azure Term: Portal

AWS Term: Management Console

Migration

To enable Azure migration from other platforms, or facilitate migration to AWS cloud systems, the following terms are used:

Azure Term: Migrate

AWS Term: Application Discovery Service

Cost Management

Services that help to manage cloud costs while maximising available resource – these are extended by our CloudOps management platform which adds extra functionality to help reduce costs further:

Azure Term: Cost Management

AWS Term: Cost Explorer