Compare the core compute, storage, and database services of the top 3 providers.
The public cloud market is dominated by three main providers: AWS, Azure, and GCP. While they offer hundreds of services, their core offerings in compute, storage, and databases are conceptually similar, though the naming differs. For 'Compute', the primary IaaS service is the virtual machine. On AWS this is called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), on Azure it's Azure Virtual Machines, and on GCP it's Compute Engine. All allow you to rent servers of various sizes and configurations. For 'Storage', the flagship object storage services are AWS's Simple Storage Service (S3), Azure Blob Storage, and Google Cloud Storage. They are all highly scalable and durable platforms for unstructured data. For block storage attached to VMs, the services are AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS), Azure Disk Storage, and Google Persistent Disk. For 'Databases', all three offer a wide array of managed relational and NoSQL database services. For relational databases, the flagship services are Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service), Azure SQL Database, and Google Cloud SQL. These services manage the administrative tasks of running a database, like patching, backups, and scaling, allowing developers to focus on their application. Understanding this mapping of core services across providers is the first step in becoming cloud-agnostic and being able to choose the right tool for the job regardless of the platform.