When the cloud became a development watchword, several players immediately moved in to occupy the space. And then a few more, and then a few more, and then…. Well, pardon the pun, but the clouds burst open, and everybody suddenly seems to have a cloud offering these days. Going by various different names (like Infrastructure-as-a-Service or Backend-as-a-Service or Platform-as-a-Service or…) and offering different options, it’s hard to figure out which of these are interesting and which are yesterday’s news and which are too futuristic to be of use today. In this presentation, we’ll take a look at the clouds, read them like a weatherman, understand which are useful and why, and get a better look at a few as a concrete example. Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform are three of the big ones, but there’s a few more players out there that might surprise you and get you to stand up and take notice.