If you’ve worked with cloud for more than five minutes, you’ve probably noticed something:
each provider uses different names for concepts that are basically the same.
And nothing confuses engineers faster than learning a new cloud by trying to map terminology 1:1.
The Core Building Blocks
At a high level, all clouds need to answer the same three questions:
- Who owns the resources?
- How do we separate billing or environments?
- How do we group and manage the actual resources?
They solve these differently, but for the same goals.
Azure Structure
- Tenant. the identity and directory boundary
- Subscription. where billing and service limits exist
- Resource Group. optional grouping of resources for organization, RBAC, or lifecycle
Azure’s philosophy is:
“One big house with many rooms.”
You typically keep everything under a single tenant and multiple subscriptions.
AWS Structure
- Account. the core boundary (identity, billing, security)
- Organization (Billing Account). a parent structure to group multiple accounts
- Tags and Resource Groups. optional grouping, not required
AWS prefers the opposite approach:
“A neighborhood with many small houses.”
Each environment (dev, staging, prod, …) is usually its own isolated account.
This makes AWS extremely strong in security separation, governance, and blast-radius reduction.
GCP Structure
Google Cloud is the most “enterprise directory” model:
- Organization. Top-level entity tied to a domain (like histechist.com)
- Folders. Optional hierarchy used heavily by enterprises
- Projects. The smallest deployable and billing unit
- Labels. GCP’s version of tags
GCP’s philosophy feels like:
“A corporate campus with a main building (Organization), hallways (Folders), and rooms (Projects).”
Projects are strict boundaries: IAM, quotas, billing, APIs. All scoped at the project level.
Which Cloud Makes More Sense?
Here’s the honest, practical take:
Azure is great when:
- You want everything under a single identity umbrella
- RBAC and grouping matter a lot
- You like structured organization out of the box
AWS is great when:
- You want hard isolation between environments
- Security boundaries matter more than convenience
- You want the strongest multi-account governance story
GCP is great when:
- You like a clean, logical hierarchy
- Your org is already Google Workspace-centric
- You want projects to encapsulate everything cleanly
Once you understand the mental model, everything clicks. The portals stop feeling confusing, they’re just different interpretations of the same problem: how to keep cloud resources organized, isolated, secure, and billable.
