AWS services and their Azure, Google Cloud and open-source alternatives
The AWS services I build with, each on its own page: what it does, what it costs, who runs it, when it is the wrong choice, and what the same job is called on Azure, Google Cloud and in open source.
- From my own projects
- Sources linked
- Updated September 2026
Media and video pipelines
| AWS service | Microsoft Azure | Google Cloud | Open source / run it yourself |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Transcribe | Azure AI Speech | Speech-to-Text | Whisper |
| Amazon Rekognition | Azure AI Vision | Cloud Vision API | YOLO from Ultralytics; OpenCV |
| Amazon Bedrock Data Automation | Azure Content Understanding in Microsoft Foundry | Document AI (closest for documents) | Your own pipeline: split, transcribe, caption, then summarise; Docling |
| AWS Elemental MediaConvert | No first-party service: Azure Media Services was retired on 30 June 2024 | Transcoder API | FFmpeg |
| AWS Step Functions | Azure Logic Apps; Durable Functions (code-first) | Workflows | Apache Airflow; Temporal; Argo Workflows |
Models and agents
| AWS service | Microsoft Azure | Google Cloud | Open source / run it yourself |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Bedrock | Microsoft Foundry (formerly Azure AI Foundry) | Vertex AI | vLLM; Ollama |
| Amazon Bedrock AgentCore | Foundry Agent Service in Microsoft Foundry | Vertex AI Agent Engine | Strands Agents; LangGraph; CrewAI |
The serverless backbone
| AWS service | Microsoft Azure | Google Cloud | Open source / run it yourself |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon S3 | Azure Blob Storage | Cloud Storage | Ceph with the RADOS Gateway; MinIO |
| AWS Lambda | Azure Functions | Cloud Run functions | Knative; OpenFaaS |
| Amazon DynamoDB | Azure Cosmos DB | Bigtable; Firestore (document shape) | Apache Cassandra; ScyllaDB |
| Amazon EventBridge | Azure Event Grid | Eventarc; Pub/Sub (queue shape) | Apache Kafka; NATS |
| Amazon SQS | Azure Service Bus; Azure Queue Storage (simple version) | Pub/Sub | RabbitMQ; Redis (simple version) |
| Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate | Azure Container Apps; Azure Container Instances | Cloud Run | Kubernetes; Docker Compose |
| Amazon CloudWatch | Azure Monitor, with Log Analytics | Cloud Logging; Cloud Monitoring | Prometheus; Grafana; OpenTelemetry Collector |
Platforms and accounts
| AWS service | Microsoft Azure | Google Cloud | Open source / run it yourself |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS Organizations | Management groups and subscriptions; Azure Policy | Resource hierarchy: organization, folders, projects; Organization Policy Service | Backstage; OpenTofu; Crossplane |
| AWS IAM Identity Center | Microsoft Entra ID | Cloud Identity | Keycloak |
| AWS App Runner | Azure Container Apps; Azure App Service | Cloud Run | A container on your own server behind Traefik or NGINX; Knative |
| Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) | Azure Red Hat OpenShift | OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud | OKD; OpenShift on your own hardware |
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