Choosing a cloud provider often starts with compute, but storage is usually where long-term architecture decisions become critical.

Whether you're building applications, planning migrations, or designing scalable infrastructure, understanding how storage works across AWS, Azure, and GCP can save both cost and engineering effort later.

All three major cloud providers offer object, block, and file storage, but the implementation and ideal use cases vary.

Core Storage Types Across Cloud Platforms

Most workloads rely on three main storage models:

Object storage for backups, logs, media, and unstructured data

Block storage for databases, VMs, and low-latency workloads

File storage for shared file systems and legacy applications

The equivalent services are:

AWS: Amazon S3, EBS, EFS

Azure: Blob Storage, Managed Disks, Azure Files

GCP: Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, Filestore

At first glance, these services look interchangeable.…