How to Memorize AWS, Azure and GCP Core Services: 59 Flashcards for Cloud Exams

Cloud certification exams — AWS Cloud Practitioner, AZ-900, Google Cloud Digital Leader — rarely ask you to build anything. They ask what a service is. The AWS / Azure / GCP: Core Services deck on Flip It (deck code MQ4307, 59 cards) covers exactly that layer: a service name on the front, one plain sentence on the back, across all three major providers plus the vocabulary they share.

Sample cards

What the 59 cards cover

• AWS: EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS, VPC, IAM, CloudFront, Route 53, EBS, Elastic Load Balancer, Auto Scaling, CloudWatch, SNS, SQS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, CloudFormation, ECS, EKS
• Azure: Virtual Machines, Blob Storage, Functions, SQL Database, Azure Active Directory, App Service, AKS, Cosmos DB, Azure DevOps, Azure Monitor, Logic Apps, Virtual Network, Load Balancer, Azure CDN
• Google Cloud: Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud Functions, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Run, GKE, Firestore, Cloud IAM, Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud CDN, Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Spanner
• Shared concepts: region, availability zone, serverless computing, object storage, CDN, Infrastructure as Code, cloud monitoring, pay-as-you-go pricing, IaaS/PaaS/SaaS

Study it in rows, not in columns

The deck is ordered provider by provider, but the fastest way to hold fifty names is to learn them as rows of equivalents:

When a card shows "Firestore", answer it, then name its two cousins before moving on. Fifty isolated facts become fifteen patterns — and comparison questions are exactly how exams phrase them.

Expand the acronyms, then separate the collisions

AWS names are initialisms hiding plain English, and the deck spells every one out: EC2 = Elastic Compute Cloud, EBS = Elastic Block Store, RDS = Relational Database Service, SNS = Simple Notification Service, SQS = Simple Queue Service, VPC = Virtual Private Cloud. Say the expansion aloud and the letters stop being random. Only four names resist the trick — Route 53 (port 53, the DNS port), Lambda, BigQuery, Spanner — so give those a mnemonic each.

Then drill the near-collisions, because that is where points are lost: SNS (pub/sub broadcast) versus SQS (a queue consumed once); ECS (Amazon's own orchestrator) versus EKS (managed Kubernetes); EBS (block storage attached to one instance) versus S3 (object storage over HTTP); a region (a geographic area) versus an availability zone (one isolated data center inside it).

Three sessions of twenty cards cover the deck — one per provider — then a fourth pass on the shared-concept cards, the ones an exam will phrase abstractly.

Deck code MQ4307 — log in at flip-it.app and look for "AWS / Azure / GCP: Core Services" in the library. Working on your terminal fundamentals too? See our Linux command line study guide.