Cloud Computing Fundamentals

Essential characteristics of cloud computing (on-demand, elasticity, pay-as-you-go), Service models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, FaaS), Deployment models (public, private, hybrid, multi-cloud), Cloud value proposition (capital vs. operational expenditure, scalability economics), Shared responsibility model, Cloud-native application principles and twelve-factor app methodology.

Virtual machines and instance types across major clouds (EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine), Auto Scaling Groups and launch templates, Managed Kubernetes services (EKS, AKS, GKE), Containerization fundamentals (Docker images, registries), Orchestration concepts (pods, deployments, services, ingress), Serverless compute (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run) and event-driven architectures.

Object storage (S3, Blob Storage, Cloud Storage) characteristics and use cases, Block storage (EBS, managed disks) for databases, File storage (EFS, NFS) for shared access, Content Delivery Networks (CloudFront, CDN), Database services (RDS, DynamoDB, DocumentDB, BigQuery), Data transfer services (DataSync, Storage Gateway), Backup and disaster recovery strategies.

Virtual networking (VPC, subnets, route tables, NAT gateways, security groups), Load balancing (ALB, NLB, Global Accelerator), DNS management (Route 53, Azure DNS), Identity and Access Management (IAM roles, policies, MFA), Secrets management (Secrets Manager, Key Vault), Encryption at rest/transit, Web Application Firewall (WAF), Security best practices and compliance frameworks.

CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, Stackdriver for metrics, logs, alarms, Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Infrastructure as Code (CloudFormation, Terraform, ARM templates), CI/CD pipelines (CodePipeline, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps), Cost optimization strategies (reserved instances, spot instances, cost allocation tags), Well-Architected Framework reviews, Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies.