• The life cycle of a cloud solution encompasses the end-to-end process of planning, developing, deploying, operating, and retiring cloud-based services.
• It describes the stages a cloud-based system goes through from initial idea to retirement.
• It helps ensure the solution is well-planned, secure, scalable, and cost-effective.

The deck builds the life cycle up one step at a time. The first two steps are:

• Define the Purpose — understand the requirements of the business and determine what type of applications to run on the cloud.
• Define the Hardware — choose a compute service that gives the right support, where you resize the compute capacity in the cloud to run application programs. Compute services include EC2, Lambda and Elastic Container Service.