Cloud Icons Guide

Azure and Google Cloud icon terms: what each vendor actually permits

By the engineer who builds Datadef, from client work on data platforms · Reviewed August 21, 2026

Microsoft states its icon terms in four sentences and a do-not list, which makes Azure the easiest of the three clouds to answer confidently. Google publishes its product icons through its own library with a category system that surprises people the first time a service turns out not to have a unique mark. Here is what each one says, and what it means for the diagram you are about to draw.

Try it free
6 min readFor teams drawing Azure or Google Cloud architectures for customers or training

See it as a diagram

Everything below, as a diagram you can edit. Describe yours and see it in seconds.

203/2000• 3 credits left
Try:

No account needed · Editable canvas, not a picture

The Azure terms, paraphrased faithfully

The terms block on the Azure architecture icons page is three sentences long. Microsoft permits the use of these icons in architectural diagrams, training materials or documentation. You may copy, distribute and display them only for that permitted use unless Microsoft grants explicit permission. Microsoft reserves all other rights. The phrase "training materials" is unusually generous compared with how most vendors word this.

The download is a single SVG archive whose file name carries the version, currently Azure_Public_Service_Icons_V24.zip, so what you have is visible in the downloads folder without opening anything. Unzipped, that is the 624 Azure SVGs this site mirrors.

Microsoft updates in batches rather than on a calendar, and the same page keeps a dated table of them: July 2026 added more than ten icons including Azure DocumentDB, Azure Resiliency and AI Gateway, plus ten new or updated Microsoft Foundry marks; November 2025 added thirteen including AKS Network Policy, Azure Local, Azure Linux and Azure PubSub; August 2025 added ten including Azure Service Groups and Prometheus; November 2024 added ten including Microsoft Foundry, Azure Managed Redis and the Azure landing zone mark. Five batches in under two years, on no predictable rhythm, which is why "my set is a year old" is not a number you can reason about on Azure the way you can on AWS.

The Azure do and do-not list

The do side is three lines. Use the icon to illustrate how products can work together. In diagrams, include the product name somewhere close to the icon. Use the icons as they would appear within Azure, which is a polite way of saying use them at their published appearance rather than a variant you made.

The do-not side is the one that catches layout habits. Do not crop, flip or rotate icons. Do not distort or change icon shape in any way. Do not use Microsoft product icons to represent your product or service. Flipping an icon so a visual arrow points the other way is the single most common breach in real decks, and it is named outright.

One practical consequence, stated on the same page: the icons are not provided in Visio stencil format, they are general purpose SVG files you drag into Visio and everything else, and there are no plans to provide stencils. If a site is offering you Azure Visio stencils, it built them, which puts you back in the community-set question.

How Google Cloud packages its product icons

Google publishes its product icons through its own icon library at cloud.google.com/icons, downloadable one at a time or as a single archive, in SVG and PNG, with the pre-refresh set still available alongside. That last detail is why two Google diagrams drawn a year apart can both be built from official files and still not match. Search Console shows people typing the library URL into the query box itself, which says most of them are hunting for that page rather than a mirror.

The 2025 iconography update published marks for core products and for general product categories at the same time. So when a smaller service resolves to a category mark rather than something bespoke, that is the published design and not a missing file. Drawing your own bespoke mark to fill the perceived gap moves you outside the vendor set for no gain; the category icon with a clear label is the sanctioned answer.

Where the authoritative text lives

Vendor icon terms are short but they do change, and each vendor updates its own page. Before a deliverable ships, read the terms block on the Azure Architecture Center icons page and the Google Cloud icons page directly. Everything on this page is a summary written to help you draw, not a substitute for those.

From terms to a diagram

Datadef carries 624 Azure and 226 Google Cloud SVGs served exactly as the vendors publish them, browsable at the Azure icon collection and the Google Cloud icon collection, with per-service pages carrying the vendor attribution and licence link. The Google side is where the freshness question shows up as files rather than as prose: gcp-stackdriver.svg sits next to gcp-cloud-monitoring.svg, and gcp-data-studio.svg next to the Looker mark, because a mirror of a vendor set keeps the retired marks it was given. Searching the old name returns the old mark, which is correct for a mirror and is exactly why the label under the node has to carry the current product name.

The rule Microsoft states about putting the product name near the icon is worth adopting on every cloud, and it happens on its own when the diagram is generated from a description: each node gets its mark and its label together. From there the canvas handles the resource group zones, the labelled edges, and the export. A worked example lives in the Azure data platform diagram guide.

FAQ

Can I use Azure icons in a customer-facing deck?

Microsoft permits the icons in architectural diagrams, training materials and documentation, and a customer deck describing an architecture falls inside that. You may copy, distribute and display them for that permitted use only, and Microsoft reserves all other rights, so anything beyond illustrating how products work together needs explicit permission.

Can I rotate or recolour an Azure icon to fit my layout?

No. The published guidance says not to crop, flip or rotate icons, and not to distort or change the icon shape in any way. Flipping an icon so a visual arrow points the other direction is the most common breach in practice. Change the layout instead of the artwork.

Are the Azure architecture icons available as Visio stencils?

No. The Azure Architecture Center icons page states that the icons are not provided in Visio stencil format, that they are general purpose SVG files you can drag into Visio and other drawing tools directly, and that there are no plans to provide stencils. Any Azure Visio stencil set you find was assembled by a third party from those SVGs.

Why does my Google Cloud service only have a generic category icon?

The 2025 Google Cloud iconography update published marks for core products and for general product categories together, so a category mark is the published icon for that service rather than a gap in the set. Use it with the product name labelled next to it. Drawing a bespoke mark to fill the perceived hole puts an unofficial glyph in a diagram whose whole value is that its marks are official.

Do I need to write the product name next to each icon?

Microsoft recommends it explicitly for Azure, and it is good practice on every cloud. Icons are recognition aids, not identifiers: two services in the same family often share a visual language, and the label is what removes the ambiguity for a reader who does not use that service daily.