Basic cloud and AWS terminology

There is a constant effort by technology companies to offer common standards for certain technologies while providing exclusive and proprietary technology that no one else offers. An example of this can be seen in the database market. The Standard Query Language (SQL) and the ANSI-SQL standard have been around for a long time. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) adopted SQL as the SQL-86 standard in 1986. Since then, database vendors have continuously supported this standard while offering various extensions to make their products stand out and lock in customers to their technology.

Cloud providers provide the same core functionality for a wide variety of customer needs, but they all feel compelled to name these services differently, no doubt in part to try to separate themselves from the rest of the pack. As an example, every major cloud provider offers compute services. In other words, it is simple to spin up a server with any provider, but they all refer to this compute service differently:

• AWS uses Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) instances.
• Azure uses Azure Virtual Machines.
• GCP uses Google Compute Engine.

The following tables give a non-comprehensive list of the different core services offered by AWS, Azure, and GCP and the names used by each of them. However, if you are confused by all the terms in the tables, don't fret. We will learn about many of these services throughout the book and when to use them.

Figure 1.2 – Cloud provider terminology and comparison (part 1)

These are some of the other services, including serverless technology services and database services:

Figure 1.3 – Cloud provider terminology and comparison (part 2)

These are additional services:

Figure 1.4 – Cloud provider terminology and comparison (part 3)

The next section will explain why cloud services are becoming popular and why AWS adoption is prevalent.