The arrangement and interconnection of cloud resources, services, and networks that make up a cloud infrastructure deployment. Like a city map showing roads, buildings, and utilities, cloud topology describes how compute instances, storage, databases, and networking components are organized and connected. Understanding topology is crucial for optimizing performance, ensuring redundancy, and maintaining security. Each cloud provider has specific topology patterns — AWS uses Regions and Availability Zones, Azure has Regions and Availability Zones, GCP uses Regions and Zones, and OCI has Regions and Availability Domains.
A global e-commerce company designs their cloud topology with primary infrastructure in US East and disaster recovery in US West. Their topology includes a VPC with public and private subnets across three availability zones, with application servers in private subnets behind a load balancer, and database clusters with cross-region replication for failover.
Each cloud provider organizes resources in a hierarchical topology of regions, zones, and virtual networks for redundancy and performance.