Recently, I passed the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam. While I am mainly focussed on Azure, I thought this will be a good exam to take to understand the market leader. I signed up for AWS Cloud Quest. This was interactive training where you have to do things for real in AWS environment, and your actions are verified before you proceed to the next level. This is similar to Microsoft Learn, where you have Concierge environments, and your work is verified before you proceed to the next module.

Based on my limited experience with AWS, I think it is not that difficult to learn the high level stuff, if you are already across Azure. In this post, I want to just to the compare the various services across AWS and Azure. This exam is not technical. It is just about knowing the AWS Technology Landscape and Cloud Computing in general.

Service/Terminology in AWS	Service/Terminology in Azure
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)	Virtual Machines
Lambda	Azure Functions
Elastic Bean Stack	App Service
S3 (Simple Storage Service)	Storage Account
SNS (Simple Notification Service)	Event Grid
SQS (Simple Queue Service)	Service Bus
EFS (Elastic File System)	Storage Account + Azure Files
Step Functions	Logic Apps
Elastic Container Registry	Azure Container Registry
App Flow	Azure Data Factory
Cost Explorer	Cost Management + Azure Advisor
Reserved Instances	Reserved Instances
AWS Outposts	Azure Stack/Azure Arc
Elastic Kubernetes Service	Azure Kubernetes Service
App Runner	Container Apps
RDS (Relational Database Service)	Azure SQL Managed Instance
Dynamo DB	Cosmos DB
AWS X-Ray	Application Insights
Cloud Watch	Azure Monitor
Cloud Formation	ARM/Bicep Templates
AWS Config	Activity Log + Log Analytics + Azure Policy
AWS OpsWorks	Azure Desired State Configuration + Azure Automation
Account	Subscription
Organization	Management Group
Amazon CloudFront	Azure Front Door
Amazon Route 53	Traffic Manager
AWS Direct Connect	Express Route
AWS Global Accelerator	Azure Front Door + Application Gateway, but I am not 100% sure on this
AWS PrivateLink	Azure Private Link
Elastic Load Balancing	Load Balancer or Application Gateway
Amazon GuardDuty	Azure Sentinel + Microsoft Defender
Amazon Inspector	Azure Sentinel + Microsoft Defender
Amazon Macie	Microsoft Purview
Key Management Service, Secrets Manager, Certificates Manager	Azure KeyVault
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)	Virtual Network (VNet)
Network Access Control List (NACL) + Security Groups	Network Security Group (NSG) + Application Security Group (ASG)

The big surprise to me was how AWS charges for support plans. If you exceed the spending cap, you are charged percentage of your spending as the support cost.

Compare this with Azure Support Plans, where it is a flat fee.

It was a good exam to prepare for and take, as you get a good idea about the competition, and what is better or lacking in Azure.