There are hundreds, if not thousands of different cloud services to choose from, it can be quite overwhelming. Where to start? Also, while each cloud vendor offers the same services and/or functionality (there are differences, of course) they all use slightly different naming conventions, which can be very confusing. That’s why I thought it would be helpful to list a bunch most used Cloud services (25 in total), on a per platform (AWS, Azure, and Google) basis, listing their main purpose/use-case and accompanying service names. This way you’ll know where to start and what to look for, hopefully. The primary focus lies on Compute, Networking, Storage, and Databases services – the building blocks of (Cloud) life.
NOTE – version 2.0 is now available! Go here
As mentioned, the idea is to provide you with an overview of some of the most commonly used Cloud services, it’s not meant as a feature by feature comparison between platforms. However, since all of these services have various characteristics and options to choose from, I’m thinking about putting together another, more detailed cheat sheet, or multiple even. Perhaps more focused on some of the problems we are trying to solve instead of comparing the various platforms like for like – thanks for your feedback, Andrew.
Funny fact: about two weeks ago Christiaan Brinkhoff released a cheat sheet on workspace solutions running on Microsoft Azure. What a coincidence! I was working on this one at the exact same time. We were in contact shortly after that and a laugh about it. Luckily, we both covered different topics. Otherwise, I had to come up with something new all over again – while he published his sheet I was only halfway finished.
If you have anything you would like to add, let me know. It’s near to impossible to get it all ‘right’ in the first try. Also, new and existing services are published, change and evolve as we speak – especially with AWS re:Invent just behind us, though, I was able to update the sheet with some of their latest announcements. This involves name changes, new features, and so on. The same applies to regions and zones, new ones are created/launched continuously, so bear with me. Even before publishing I already received some valuable feedback from various community members, which is very helpful.
By the way, if you are interested in more of my (cheat sheet) work, I’ve published multiple sheets throughout the last couple of years, go here to have a look.
