A pre-designed, best-practice cloud architecture template that solves a common use case and can be adapted for specific business needs. Like a model home that showcases standard layouts and features, reference architectures provide proven blueprints for building applications such as web apps, data pipelines, microservices, and machine learning platforms. AWS provides AWS Architecture Center with hundreds of reference diagrams, Azure offers Azure Architecture Center, GCP has Cloud Architecture Center, and OCI provides Reference Architecture documentation — all with detailed diagrams and implementation guides.
A healthcare startup uses AWS's HIPAA-compliant reference architecture as a starting point for their patient portal. The reference architecture includes an Application Load Balancer, ECS containers in a private subnet, an encrypted RDS database, and CloudTrail logging — all pre-configured to meet healthcare compliance requirements. They customize it by adding their own API services while keeping the security foundations intact.
Every major cloud provider maintains libraries of pre-designed reference architectures covering common use cases from web applications to data pipelines.