Cloud Basic: Core Concepts for Interview Prep and Certs

Work through a sample AWS Cloud Practitioner exam question on why teams choose cloud over on-prem, highlighting highly available infrastructure, elastic resources, no upfront cost, and cost-effectiveness.

Define cloud computing through Gartner's core elements: scalable, elastic, and delivered as a service. Explore NIST's five essential characteristics and the service and deployment models.

Explore the five essential cloud characteristics—on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service—defined by NIST and linked to pay-as-you-go models.

The modern cloud defines renting resources and paying for what you use, running in another data center with resources distributed across locations and a shared responsibility between provider and user.

Explore an exam-style question on why AWS is more economical than on-prem data centers for varying compute workloads, highlighting on-demand EC2 instances as the key cost-saving approach.

Clarify the concept of scalability by contrasting it with resilience, elasticity, and availability, concluding that scalability means the system can grow in size, capacity, and scope.

Explain software as a service, platform as a service, and infrastructure as a service, highlighting control, shared responsibility, and examples like Google Docs and virtual machines.

Explore the core cloud service models—saas, iaas, and paas—and how serverless functions and container services change who controls what. Learn how to balance control and delegation to optimize cloud choices.

Clarify the shared responsibility model to know what the cloud provider covers vs. what you must secure in the cloud, varying by service and provider for certification and architecture.

Explore the shared responsibility model in the AWS cloud practitioner exam, identifying which duties fall to the customer versus the cloud, with data encrypted at rest as the customer's responsibility.

Explore deployment models by examining public, private, and hybrid clouds—how they are set up, accessed, and used, including on-prem private infrastructure and migration scenarios.

Explore the public, private, and hybrid deployment models, weighing their scalability, costs, security, and control, and preview community and multi-cloud options for strategic decisions and certifications.

Identify the hybrid cloud as the approach that combines on-premises investments with data and applications shared across on-prem and cloud environments, as illustrated by AZ-900 exam questions.

Practice exam questions map infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service to hosting and management, a managed development environment, and pay as you go.

Examine economies of scale as cost advantages gained from scaling, and how cloud providers achieve lower costs by operating at scale, passing savings to customers through competition.

Compare capex and opex in cloud contexts: capex means upfront hardware purchase and ownership for predictable scale and consistent utilization, while opex entails monthly payments for fluctuating demand.

Compare infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service, focusing on ownership vs renting. Assess cloud decisions using long-term cost, depreciation, and future needs.

Identify the pay as you go pricing model in this AWS exam question, known as the rent model, used by AWS and other cloud providers like Azure.

Identify core cloud service categories: compute, storage, networking, application, and analytics, and understand how virtual machines embody the basic compute resource and underpin service design.

Clouds provide a ui or api to provision virtual machines, controlled by a dedicated control plane. They run on physical hardware in data centers at scale, offloading on-prem work.

Explore the pets versus cattle analogy to understand how cloud architectures decouple hardware resources from software control, using SLAs to guarantee availability.

Explore regions and availability zones across major cloud providers, map regions to data centers, and learn to deploy resources by cost, proximity, service availability, service level agreements, and data compliance.

Availability zones are independently functioning data centers within a region, geographically separated to withstand disasters, with your service running in one zone and a backup in another.

Explore how AWS global infrastructure, through regions and availability zones, enables redundant architectures across isolated locations to ensure high availability and disaster recovery.

Explore compute services across AWS and Azure by studying virtual machines, images, and configuration, and learn to classify offerings by type while managing regions, instantiation, and billing.

Explore a cloud service inventory across AWS, Azure, and GCP, classifying compute, storage, and network offerings, with practical demos of free tiers and real-world parallels.

Explore cloud fundamentals, on-prem contrasts, and cloud definitions to prepare for certifications. Review service and deployment models, shared responsibility, regions, availability zones, and cloud-native exam questions.