When I started working on cloud infrastructures, I thought architecture was about designing the perfect setup.
High availability. Load balancing. Autoscaling.
But the lessons that shaped me didn’t come from blueprints.
They came from moving real workloads between clouds and realizing how different “identical” concepts really are.
Like the first time I migrated from AWS EC2 to GCP Compute Engine.
I thought it was just instance mapping.
Same VM, different name.
Then the billing dashboard hit me, sustained-use discounts, custom machine types, committed-use plans, completely different cost logic.
That’s when I learned: architecture isn’t just design, it’s economics.
Or when I switched from CloudFormation to Terraform (and experimented with Bicep for Azure).
My templates broke in unexpected ways, resource dependencies, state handling, naming collisions.
That’s when I realized: “multi-cloud ready” doesn’t mean “copy-paste ready.”
Then came IAM.
AWS roles and policies made sense until I met GCP’s project-level bindings and Azure’s Entra ID integration.
I granted one service account too much access, and it propagated through the entire org.
That mistake taught me governance isn’t about control, it’s about containment.
Networking humbled me too.
AWS VPCs felt familiar.
Then I discovered GCP’s global VPC and Azure’s Virtual WAN.
What I thought was regional suddenly became global routing and my assumptions about latency and segmentation went out the window.
That’s when I learned: the diagram you draw doesn’t always match the traffic that flows.
Storage?
I thought S3 and GCS were interchangeable.
Until I realized lifecycle rules, redundancy classes, and cross-region replication all behave differently.
My cost model blew up and I finally understood why “object storage” isn’t a single concept.
Even observability taught me something.
CloudWatch metrics didn’t map 1:1 to Cloud Monitoring or Azure Monitor.
I rebuilt dashboards from scratch, this time in Looker Studio and with Defender for Cloud signals.
That’s when I saw that observability isn’t about tools, it’s about perspective.
But the biggest shift wasn’t technical.
It was mental.
Migrating between clouds forces you to let go of comfort.
It makes you question every default, every assumption, every “this is how we always do it.”
And that’s where real architecture maturity begins.
Because in the end, you don’t learn cloud architecture from certifications.
You learn it from the friction of migration from the moments where your design breaks and your understanding deepens.
If you’ve ever moved workloads across AWS, Azure, or GCP, you know exactly what I mean.
Every service feels the same until it doesn’t.
That’s why I built a 2025 cloud components mindmap comparing compute, storage, IAM, automation, and cost optimization across all three.
❤️ Ping me if you want the updated mindmap.
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