Cloud Basics Cheat Sheet

Last Updated: November 21, 2025

Cloud Service Models

Model Description Examples
IaaS Infrastructure as a Service - Virtual machines, storage AWS EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine
PaaS Platform as a Service - Managed platforms for apps AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service, GCP App Engine
SaaS Software as a Service - Ready-to-use applications Gmail, Office 365, Salesforce

AWS Core Services

Service Purpose
EC2 Virtual servers in the cloud
S3 Object storage service
RDS Managed relational databases
Lambda Serverless compute
VPC Virtual private cloud networking

Azure Core Services

Service Purpose
Virtual Machines Compute instances
Blob Storage Object storage
SQL Database Managed SQL databases
Functions Serverless compute
Virtual Network Private networking

GCP Core Services

Service Purpose
Compute Engine Virtual machines
Cloud Storage Object storage
Cloud SQL Managed databases
Cloud Functions Serverless compute
VPC Virtual private cloud
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