Cloud Service Examples

Designing architectures of ICT Systems to be deployed to Public Cloud revolves around understanding Target System Architecture and how to Deploy Target System in any environent. ICT Systems typically require multiple environments and ICT resources from multiple technology categories such as DNS, TLS Certificates, Networking, Compute, Storage and Database.

Public Cloud vendors such as AWS, Azure and OCI have their own offerings for different technology categories. What is usually common between all Public Cloud vendors is that their offerigs rely on underlying ICT technology understanding so that ICT Specialist needs to know how to use and configure the services. Public Cloud skills are often General ICT Skills:

Handle Domains and TLS Certificates.
Manage Operating Systems.
Fluent usage of various CLI (cmd, bash, PowerShell, etc.).
Work with various configuration and data formats (JSON, XML, YAML, CSV, etc.).
Implement basic scripting and programming tasks.
Understand relationships between URL, HTTP Protocol, Web Browser, Web App (Static, SPA, PWA) and Web Server (standalone, builtin).
Install, configure and troubleshoot system components.
Configure and troubleshoot networking.
Manage different user identities (human, system, tool, bot, etc.) and permissions on various levels (infrastructure, OS, application, services, etc.).)
Handle data encryption at rest and in transit.
Backup and restore persistent data (files, logs, databases and records).
Understand concepts related to how organizations are structured and led (governance, leadership, management, administration, compliance, operations, etc.).
Work with processes and practices that are closely linked to Cloud (ITIL, DevOps, ISO 27001, Porter’s Value Chain, etc.).
And so on and so forth…

Other part of Public Cloud skills is to understand General Public Cloud Concepts and to be able to work specifically with some Public Cloud vendor technologies. While underlying General ICT Skills are always the same, the product offerings between different Public Cloud vendors may have minor or major variations between one another and Cloud Vendor specific technologies can be said to have distinctive differences. However, as ICT Specialist knows General ICT Skills and understand General Public Cloud Concepts then moving between different Cloud Vendor technologies should be pretty easy, but to truly master specific Cloud Vendor technologies requires time and effort. Public Cloud skills are often things like:

Understand Cloud Concepts.
Understand Cloud Economics.
Cloud vendor product category and product knowledge.
Leverage different Cloud management technologies (portal, CLI, SDK/API, IaC - Templates, IaC - General Purpose Programming Language.
Cloud framework knowledge (CAF, WAF, Landing Zone, FinOps, etc.).
Design systems that leverage such Cloud resources as warranted by the requirements.
Work with various Cloud vendor specific technologies.
And so on and so forth…

Imagine a scenario where an organization has developed a website that offers cat pictures to their customers. We can define a Solution Architecture for this website that has web, app and storage architectural layers. The solution architecture for AWS, Azure and OCI looks largely the same. However, even with this simple example we can observe differences between Public Cloud Vendor general service offerings and how similar services between Public Cloud Vendors are slightly different. You can review AWS, Azure and OCI Service Examples for imaginary cat picture website below.