Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing, fundamentally changing how organizations access and manage technology infrastructure. Rather than investing in and maintaining physical data centers, organizations can provision compute, storage, databases, networking, and other services instantly from cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. The key mental model: cloud computing shifts IT from a capital expenditure (buying servers) to an operational expenditure (renting capacity), enabling unprecedented agility, scalability, and cost efficiency while letting teams focus on innovation rather than infrastructure management.
What This Cheat Sheet Covers
This topic spans 15 focused tables and 108 indexed concepts. Below is a complete table-by-table outline of this topic, spanning foundational concepts through advanced details.
Table 1: Service Models
| Model | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|
AWS EC2, Azure Virtual Machines, Google Compute Engine | Provides virtualized computing resources over the internet — you manage OS, runtime, middleware, and applications while the provider manages physical infrastructure, networking, and storage hardware | |
AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service, Google App Engine | Offers a complete development and deployment environment in the cloud — handles infrastructure, OS, middleware, and runtime so developers focus solely on code and data | |
Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Google Workspace, Dropbox | Delivers fully managed applications over the internet — users access via browser with zero infrastructure management, automatic updates, and subscription pricing | |
AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions | Enables event-driven code execution without managing servers — pay only for actual compute time in milliseconds, with automatic scaling from zero to thousands of concurrent executions | |
Amazon ECS, Azure Container Instances, Google Kubernetes Engine | Offers container orchestration and management — deploy, scale, and manage containerized applications without managing the underlying infrastructure |