Cloud Computing Fundamentals
Learn what cloud computing changes: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, scalability, availability, AWS regions and AZs, and the shared responsibility model.
What You'll Learn
Understanding Why Cloud Computing Is a Different Operational Model
It is 3 PM on a Monday at a food-delivery company in Bengaluru. Orders are climbing toward the evening rush, and the current servers will not cope.
Understanding the Cloud Service Models
Service models describe how much of the technology stack you manage and how much the provider manages.
Understanding Cloud Deployment Models
Deployment models describe where infrastructure lives and who shares it. This is a separate question from service models.
Understanding Core Cloud Engineering Concepts
These five ideas separate "knows AWS services" from "thinks like a cloud engineer." They apply to every service, and later modules assume you know...
Understanding AWS Global Infrastructure
AWS's physical infrastructure is a hierarchy.
Understanding the Shared Responsibility Model
This is one of the most important ideas in cloud security, and teams new to AWS often get it wrong.
Skills You'll Master
Curriculum Index9 topics
Understanding Why Cloud Computing Is a Different Operational Model
It is 3 PM on a Monday at a food-delivery company in Bengaluru.
Understanding the Cloud Service Models
Service models describe how much of the technology stack you manage and how much the provider manages.
Understanding Cloud Deployment Models
Deployment models describe where infrastructure lives and who shares it.
Understanding Core Cloud Engineering Concepts
These five ideas separate "knows AWS services" from "thinks like a cloud engineer." They apply to every service, and...
Understanding AWS Global Infrastructure
AWS's physical infrastructure is a hierarchy.
Understanding the Shared Responsibility Model
This is one of the most important ideas in cloud security, and teams new to AWS often get it wrong.
Understanding AWS Core Concepts Every Engineer Needs
AWS accounts: the billing and security boundary An AWS account is the basic container for your resources and the basic...
Building the Hands-On Lab
This lab creates no billable resources. It costs nothing beyond what your account plan already allows.
Quick Reference
Key terms Common mistakes when starting with cloud computing Treating "cloud" as one thing.
Career Impact
Roles that use the skills in this module.
Cloud Engineer
DevOps Engineer
Solutions Architect
Next Modules
Related Guides
Practice on the Coding Sheet
Not a software engineer sheet. Every problem comes from real DevOps, SRE, Platform and Cloud interviews, from your first script to a system you build yourself.
Open the Coding SheetFrequently Asked Questions
Cloud computing means renting computing resources such as servers, storage, and databases over the internet instead of buying and running your own hardware. You create what you need in minutes and pay for what you use. The provider owns and operates the physical data centers.
Scalability is the ability to handle more load by adding resources. Elasticity is doing that automatically as demand rises and falls, then removing the extra resources when they are no longer needed. A system can be scalable without being elastic if a human has to add capacity by hand.
An Availability Zone (AZ) is one or more separate data centers inside an AWS Region, each with its own power, cooling, and networking. Spreading an application across two or more AZs keeps it running if one AZ fails.
Both sides, for different layers. AWS secures the cloud itself: data centers, hardware, and the virtualization layer. You secure what you put in the cloud: your data, IAM permissions, network rules, and the software you run.