Choosing a Cloud Provider
Welcome to the Course 🎉
This lesson introduces the major cloud providers and gives you a practical way to choose a sensible starting point.
In this lesson, you will learn to:
- Summarize the origins and typical strengths of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
- Identify how each provider organizes resources, billing, and permissions.
- Explain why existing agreements, staff skills, and software often create a natural default provider.
This lesson starts with the question every stakeholder asks first: which provider should we use, and why?
Where the Big Three Came From and What They Are Good At 🔎
The three largest cloud providers are Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. It helps to know where each one came from, because their origins still shape what they are best at today.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched first, in 2006, out of Amazon's own need to run a very large online retailer. Because it has been building longest, it has the widest catalogue of services, and the largest pool of engineers who already know it. If a capability exists in cloud computing at all, it almost certainly exists on Amazon Web Services.
Microsoft Azure came from a company that was already inside almost every corporate office. That is its real anchor: it aligns closely with the Microsoft software organizations already run, including Windows Server, Microsoft 365, and Active Directory, which is the directory system that holds staff usernames and permissions. If a company already pays Microsoft for licensing, Azure tends to slot into those agreements with the least friction.
Google Cloud grew out of the engineering Google built to run search, YouTube, and its own advertising systems. Its factual anchor is large-scale data and analytics work, along with containers, since Google originally created the Kubernetes project that most container platforms now use.
Notice what none of those descriptions say. They do not say one is faster, safer, or "best-in-class". Those are marketing adjectives, and stakeholders will (rightly) distrust you if you use them. Stick to the factual anchors: who launched first, who fits an existing Microsoft estate, who grew out of large-scale data engineering.
How Each Provider Organizes Your Work ⚖️
Every provider gives you containers for grouping resources, and those containers are where billing and permissions get drawn. Getting the vocabulary right matters, because it is the first thing a finance or security stakeholder will ask about.
The provider names differ, but the hierarchy is easy to compare at a glance:
| Provider | Resource Container | Billing and Organization Context |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services | Account | Organizations is the umbrella grouping multiple accounts, such as separate production and test accounts. |
| Microsoft Azure | Resource group | Resource groups sit inside a subscription, where billing is drawn; a directory tenant holds users and permissions. |
| Google Cloud | Project | Projects can be nested in folders under an organization. |
The pattern is the same everywhere even though the words differ: a small container for related resources, a bigger container that owns the bill, and a structure above that for the whole company. When someone asks "how will we stop the marketing experiment spending our production budget?", the answer is always "we put it in a separate account, subscription, or project."
