A cloud offering catalogue can be compared with any online shopping websites items catalogue. In any online shopping website, there are different types of items available for purchase, and then each item maybe available in different sizes or versions.

Customers choose items available in the given catalogue and make a purchase. The similar purchase aspect applies in the case of cloud catalogues. If we see any public cloud provider, such as Microsoft, Amazon, and more such catalogues for virtual machines offerings, there would be a range of operating systems available in different formats, such as Vanilla OS or an OS customized for particular application or workload type, which are available in different size configurations (CPU/memory/storage capacity). There can be other characteristics as well as differentiating catalogues, such as high availability, performance, features, and so on.

In the case of Windows Azure Pack-based...