Cloud Platforms, Explained (AWS / GCP / Azure)
You've heard "we run on AWS" or "let's spin up a VM on GCP" a hundred times, and you've probably nodded along. Then you opened the AWS console once, saw a sidebar with two hundred service names you'd never heard of, and quietly closed the tab. That reaction is correct. Nobody knows all of them. Nobody is supposed to.
Here's the secret the console hides: underneath the sprawl, a cloud platform sells a very small number of things, and AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure all sell the same small number of things with different names. Once you have that mental model, the two hundred service names stop being a wall and become a catalog you can skim. This guide gives you that model - the shape, not the encyclopedia.
How to read this
- Want the gist fast? Read Phase 1 - it installs the one idea everything else hangs on. Then skim the vendor-mapping table in Phase 2.
- Want it to finally make sense? Read in order. Each phase builds on the last: what the cloud is, the blocks it's made of, and how to choose among them without getting burned.
The phases
- What "The Cloud" Actually Sells - renting computing on demand instead of owning servers, and why all three big platforms are the same shape underneath.
- The Building Blocks (Across Vendors) - the five or six pieces that matter - compute, object storage, managed databases, networking, identity - name-mapped across AWS, GCP, and Azure in one table.
- IaaS vs PaaS vs Serverless, and Staying Sane - the spectrum from raw VMs to managed platforms to functions, and the three gotchas that actually hurt: surprise bills, IAM complexity, and lock-in.
Deliberately out of scope: this is the mental model, not a certification course. We don't walk through the console click-by-click, and we don't cover any single service in depth. When you're ready to manage cloud resources as code instead of clicking, that's a different skill - Infrastructure as Code with Terraform.