In addition to having to just simply spec out what technology you want, be it SQL, NoSQL, Couchbase, MySQL, Postgres, you also need to pick how you're going to host it. And, honestly, from my experience, your hosting solution, be it which cloud provider you're on, is going to make a big decision. 

Now, the good news is, for a lot of the classic ones, such as Postgres and MySQL, all the cloud providers have the same offerings with a little bit of twists. But let's go through each one and we can explain kind of the twists that each cloud provider puts on their specific database offerings.

So Amazon in particular has a lot of database options, way too many to cover in a course such as this. As we previously mentioned, Cloud Academy has a lot of deep dives into specific technologies, but the big ones you're gonna run across, typically start with RDS, or Relational Database Service. This is where you'll find your classics, MySQL, SQL Server, Postgres, and then some Amazon variants like Aurora, which have Postgres compatibility, and your classic databases.

For NoSQL, Amazon has offers such as Dynamo DB, which is their in-house NoSQL solution, along with hosted solutions for things like Mongo DB. Finally, there are a few more exotic big data databases available like Athena and Redshift. These are typically falling into that class of you have more than four terabytes of data and you need to scale, but just know that there are a lot of options. And as a beginner to intermediate person deploying on the cloud, I would strongly suggest starting with RDS if you need relational, or dynamo DB or Mongo DB if you need NoSQL.

If you're more of a Google person, or your company's centered on GCP, look to their cloud SQL offering to get your standard core set of databases. Once again, your MySQL, your Postgres, your SQL Server. This honestly is not terribly differentiated from Amazon's RDS, you're pretty much getting the same hosted server environment. But the more exotic databases are where it starts to become a little more differentiated.

Google has Google Bigtable, which is one of the most scalable NoSQL solutions for going above that four terabyte option. They also have solutions such as Google Firestore, which is a very powerful NoSQL database. Typically speaking though, you're gonna find yourself sticking to the cloud SQLs, or maybe the Firestore if you're more of a mobile app front-end developer with Google offerings.

And finally, just for the sake of covering the top three big ones, let's go over Azure's offerings. Of course, they are going to offer the same set of core, standard databases, but there's, of course, a particular focus on their SQL server, because Microsoft is of course a major contributor to that. But there's a special note in my opinion of calling out their Cosmos DB. Perhaps you've seen it called Document DB in older documentation, it underwent some branding improvements. But this, in my opinion, is one of the premier, if not the best, although I don't want to say it formally, it is a phenomenal NoSQL solution that is extremely scalable.

So Azure, just to recap, strong all around offering just like the other two providers, but Cosmos DB, in my opinion, deserves a special call out as a phenomenal NoSQL database that is exclusive to Azure.