cloud-provider-advisor_skill

Overview

This skill helps teams pick the best cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) for a workload by comparing service fit, cost, compliance, and migration complexity. It produces a clear recommendation with justifications, service mappings, cost estimates, and migration risk assessments. Use it to accelerate provider choice or to design a multi-cloud strategy backed by concrete tradeoffs.

How this skill works

The skill validates workload type and ranked priorities, maps equivalent services across providers, and applies cost and compliance heuristics to produce a primary recommendation. For quick decisions it returns a concise recommendation, service mapping, rough monthly cost (±30%), and migration complexity. For detailed analysis it expands to service-by-service comparison, tighter cost estimates (±10%), migration plan, multi-cloud patterns, and vendor lock-in mitigation.

When to use it

• Selecting a cloud provider for a new application or platform
• Evaluating a migration from on-premises to public cloud
• Comparing AWS, GCP, Azure for cost, compliance, or performance tradeoffs
• Designing a multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud strategy
• Assessing vendor lock-in risk and mitigation options

Best practices

• Provide a ranked list of priorities (e.g., cost, performance, security) and precise workload_type
• Supply hard constraints up front (data residency, FedRAMP, region requirements) to avoid invalid recommendations
• Use the quick path for most decisions; request the detailed path for multi-service or enterprise scenarios
• Favor containerization and open-source databases to reduce vendor lock-in
• Validate cost estimates with provider calculators and a pilot before large migrations

Example use cases

• Recommend a primary provider for a web-app with cost and low-latency priorities
• Compare analytics/ML stacks: BigQuery/Vertex AI (GCP) vs Redshift/SageMaker (AWS) vs Synapse/Vertex-equivalents (Azure)
• Produce migration complexity and timeline for on-premises → cloud lift-and-shift
• Design a primary+DR multi-cloud pattern (e.g., AWS primary, Azure DR) with failover considerations
• Assess compliance fit for HIPAA or FedRAMP workloads and suggest region-specific options