If you are familiar with Microsoft Azure services, a quick way to understand what the various Google Cloud Platform services do is to map them to Azure services that offer similar functionality.
Because Google and Microsoft take different approaches in building cloud services, any mapping between the two can only be a rough guide. The following table only lists services that have a useful mapping between the two platforms.
| Microsoft Azure Services | Google Cloud Platform |
|---|---|
| Compute | |
| Azure Cloud Services and App Service | Google App Engine (1) |
| Azure Virtual Machines | Google Compute Engine (2) |
| Azure Container Service | Google Container Engine |
| Azure Functions | Google Cloud Functions |
| Storage | |
| Azure Block Blobs | Google Cloud Storage Standard |
| Database | |
| Azure DocumentDB | Google Cloud Datastore |
| Azure SQL Database | Google Cloud SQL |
| Big data | |
| Azure Event Hubs and Azure Service Bus | Google Cloud Pub/Sub |
| Azure HD Insight | Google Cloud Dataflow and Google Cloud Dataproc |
| Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Azure Data Lake Analytics | Google BigQuery |
| Monitoring | |
| Azure Application Insights and Azure Operational Insights | Google Cloud Monitoring and Google Cloud Logging |
| Networking | |
| Azure DNS | Google Cloud DNS |
| Azure ExpressRoute (3) | Google Cloud Interconnect |
| Azure Load Balancer | Google Cloud Load Balancing (HTTP/HTTPS Load Balancing and Network Load Balancing) |
| Identity & Security | |
| Azure Key Vault | Google Cloud Key Management Service (Cloud KMS) |
| Deployment | |
| Azure Resource Manager | Google Cloud Deployment Manager |
(1) Microsoft Azure App Services and App Engine are often described as similar offerings, but there are significant differences in their approaches. While App Engine offers auto-scaling capable of supporting millions of users, App Services requires manual adjustment to handle traffic. App Engine is a platform as a service (PaaS), meaning that it's fully managed, so all of these administrative tasks are handled by Google. The basic App Engine setup includes built-in services such as Task Queues, Memcache, Users API, and more.
(2) Compute Engine has auto-scaling, load balancing, and monitoring of unmanaged VMs.
(3) Azure ExpressRoute may vary significantly from Google Cloud Interconnect in terms of connectivity options, service providers, and available locations.
