Reference architecture

When we started off with an article on Architecture in 2017, it was inspired by the book series, The Architecture of Open Source Applications Special:BookSources/978-1-25763801-7

Because the second volume of that book contained a chapter on MediaWiki, we focused on the architecture of that software, as implemented at the WMF for Wikipedia et al.

And, we referred to some of the literature at AWS for comparison since AWS was a commercial outlet where you could build your own without needing to replicate the vast free software organizational wisdom that WMF has.

Fast-forward 7 years, and this page serves as a launch point for reference architectures across various cloud providers.

Amazon AWS

Amazon AWS has their architecture center at https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/

Google Cloud

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Google's cloud computing platform is called GCP. GCP lists "deployment archetypes" to describe the various mixtures of on-premises with cloud. And then goes on to illustrate some common patterns for their cloud such as "multi-tier application in multiple regions" https://cloud.google.com/architecture/multiregional-vms

This is all part of their larger website called the "Cloud Architecture Center" which contains the "textbook" talking points about adoption of big tech to meet business goals

Microsoft Cloud

Microsoft takes a more branded approach to cloud, so it's called "Azure" (word meaning blue, like the sky).

Not surprisingly for a large software company, they go deep into describing "patterns" (ref. the "Gang of Four"'s Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software ISBN: BookSources/0-201-63361-2) of cloud computing at their Azure Architecture Center. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/patterns/

WikiMedia Foundation = the organization which runs various projects including Wikipedia.org

International Standard Book Number = 10-digit or 13-digit codes used by the publishing industry to uniquely identify individual book titles and editions. Some 10-digit ISBNs may end with an "X" instead of a digit.