Cloud providers have a lot of services, and innovation is accelerating; therefore, understanding how to choose the right service to solve business problems can be a tough prospect. The large cloud providers have designed their services to be like building blocks that can be used together to solve problems that may never have been considered for that specific service. This approach allows customer design teams to be creative and think outside the box with experimentation and fail fast projects. The key is to have a good understanding of what services are actually available. Foundational infrastructure services, once the growth drivers of the cloud, have matured to a state where they are often decided on by default. Setting up landing zones with specific networking addresses, subnets, security groups, and routes is done with Infrastructure as Code, using a consistent and approved model. However, there are still some important foundational considerations, specifically regarding operating systems.

Moving up the service stack is where the large public cloud vendors start to differentiate from their peers. The offerings vary by provider and can include anything from managed database platforms to fully trained machine learning facial recognition. Understanding how these services fit into a cloud native strategy, how to price them for at-scale usage, and if there are alternatives that have a more niche feature to meet architecture needs is critical along the journey.