Sheet 14
Cloud Provider Equivalence Matrix
Component-by-component cross-cloud mapping: AWS vs Google Cloud (GCP) vs Microsoft Azure vs Self-Hosted / VPS.
FAANG Interview Best Practice:
Default to AWS terminology in FAANG interviews unless the interviewer explicitly asks for GCP or Azure. AWS has the widest recognition and standardized service limits (e.g. NLB vs ALB, MSK, RDS Aurora, S3, ElastiCache). If the prompt mentions GCP BigQuery or Spanner, pivot fluidly using the equivalents below.
| Component | AWS (Default) | Google Cloud (GCP) | Microsoft Azure | Self-Hosted / VPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
DNS Resolution Anycast latency routing & health checks | Route53 | Cloud DNS | Azure DNS | BIND / PowerDNS / CoreDNS |
Content Delivery Network (CDN) Edge PoPs for static caching and TLS offload | CloudFront | Cloud CDN | Azure CDN | Cloudflare / Fastly |
Web Application Firewall (WAF) L7 rate limiting, SQLi, bot mitigation | AWS WAF | Cloud Armor | Azure WAF | ModSecurity + Coraza Nginx |
Load Balancer Layer 4 SYN-flood absorption, raw TCP passthrough | Network Load Balancer (NLB) | TCP Proxy LB | Azure LB | HAProxy / Nginx Stream |
Load Balancer Layer 7 HTTP/2, gRPC path-based routing | Application Load Balancer (ALB) | HTTP(S) Load Balancer | App Gateway | Traefik / Envoy / Nginx |
API Gateway Rate limiting token bucket, JWT verification | Amazon API Gateway | Apigee / API Gateway | API Management (APIM) | Kong / KrakenD / Envoy |
Container Orchestration Kubernetes multi-AZ pod scheduling | EKS | GKE | AKS | K3s / kubeadm / Nomad |
Service Mesh mTLS, circuit breaking, distributed tracing | App Mesh | Anthos Service Mesh | Open Service Mesh | Istio / Linkerd |
Message Queue / Event Bus KRaft event streaming with partition ordering | Amazon MSK (Kafka) | Pub/Sub or Confluent Cloud | Event Hubs | Kafka on Bare Metal / Strimzi |
Database (OLTP Relational) ACID transactions, read replicas | Amazon RDS / Aurora PG | Cloud SQL / AlloyDB | Azure Database for PostgreSQL | PostgreSQL + Patroni |
Database (NoSQL Document/KV) Single-digit ms key-value lookups | DynamoDB | Firestore / Bigtable | Cosmos DB | Cassandra / MongoDB / ScyllaDB |
In-Memory Cache Sub-millisecond session & catalog cache | ElastiCache (Redis) | Memorystore | Azure Cache for Redis | Redis Sentinel / Dragonfly |
Object Storage Immutable asset blobs, backups, logs | Amazon S3 | Google Cloud Storage (GCS) | Blob Storage | MinIO / Ceph |
Search & Analytics Engine Full-text faceted product catalog search | Amazon OpenSearch | Elastic Cloud on GCP | Azure Cognitive Search | Elasticsearch / OpenSearch |
Metrics Monitoring Time-series telemetry & SLO dashboards | Amazon CloudWatch | Cloud Monitoring | Azure Monitor | Prometheus + VictoriaMetrics |
Log Management Centralized structured log ingestion | CloudWatch Logs | Cloud Logging | Log Analytics | Grafana Loki / Vector |
Distributed Tracing W3C trace context end-to-end propagation | AWS X-Ray | Cloud Trace | Application Insights | Jaeger / Grafana Tempo |
Secrets & Key Management Database credential rotation & master keys | Secrets Manager / KMS | Secret Manager / Cloud KMS | Azure Key Vault | HashiCorp Vault |
CI/CD Pipelines Automated canary & rolling deployments | AWS CodePipeline | Cloud Build | Azure DevOps Pipelines | GitLab CI / GitHub Actions |
Identity & Access (IAM) OAuth2 / OIDC authentication tokens | AWS IAM / Cognito | Cloud IAM / Identity Platform | Microsoft Entra ID | Keycloak / Ory Kratos |
Serverless Functions Event-driven asynchronous webhooks | AWS Lambda | Cloud Functions | Azure Functions | OpenFaaS / Knative |
Virtual Machine Infrastructure General compute instance tier | Amazon EC2 | Compute Engine (GCE) | Azure Virtual Machines | Hetzner / DigitalOcean / Linode |