Fundamentals for your Cloud Journey

Explore the fundamental building blocks of cloud computing, from data centers and virtualization to networking, scalability and elasticity, security, encryption, and disaster recovery, establishing a solid foundation for cloud services.

Explore how data centers power applications by housing servers, storage drives, and network gear, and distinguish ownership models—enterprise, managed services, co-location, and cloud data centers—alongside regions, availability zones, and uptime.

Explore what's inside a data center, from IT infrastructure to support systems like power, cooling, and security. Learn how racks, hot and cold aisles, and elevated floors optimize operation.

discover server fundamentals, from desktop differences to scalable, redundant architectures; explore form factors (tower, rack, blade), backplanes, storage, and remote management for data centers.

Understand local storage and shift to centralized SAN storage with LUNs, iSCSI, FC, and FCoE. Explain RAID, mirroring, stripe sets, boot from SAN, and shared LUNs.

Understand how virtualization isolates applications by decoupling hardware from the OS, enabling multiple virtual machines on one server with virtual CPU, memory, disk, and network for better utilization.

Explore server, desktop, application, storage, and network virtualization that isolate resources with hypervisors and virtual machines; see type one bare-metal and type two host-based approaches in cloud environments like EC2.

Explore virtualization challenges, from noisy neighbors and resource contention to licensing costs and management overhead. Learn when bare-metal access may be needed.

Distinguish physical and logical addressing, including IP and MAC addresses and DHCP, to understand cloud networking. Learn how switches, routers, VLANs, and CAM tables forward packets across OSI layers.

Routers enable communication between different networks by forwarding packets along the best path, guided by routing tables. Explore static, default, and dynamic routing, routing protocols, and AWS networking.

Explore basic networking concepts such as north-south and east-west traffic, top-of-rack switches, the OSI model, and TCP/IP with TCP vs UDP, three-way handshake, ports, and common protocols.

Compare and map physical and aws networking concepts, from ec2 enis and subnets to routing tables, security groups, network acls, and internet gateways, for secure cloud connectivity.

Clarify cloud availability, uptime, and downtime through real-life analogies, differentiate scheduled and unscheduled interruptions, and map service level agreements and costs to workloads like ATM and video delivery.

Explore fault tolerance as the zero-downtime strategy that uses redundancy, dual engines, two pilots, and mirrored storage (raid) to keep critical systems running.

Durability measures a storage system's ability to retain data over time despite failures, as demonstrated by Amazon S3's three-copy design and 11 nines durability.

Explore scalability and elasticity in cloud architectures, contrasting scale up/down with scale in/out, and see how load balancers enable growth without impacting users.

Contrast scalability and elasticity in AWS architectures, illustrating strategic region and edge expansion, peak demand handling, and dynamic resource provisioning for scalable versus elastic systems.

Reliability is a design principle, not a finite measure, ensuring a system recovers from failures, dynamically acquires resources to meet demand, and supports rollback and tested recovery with automated scaling.

Learn the holistic concept of observability by combining metrics, logs, and traces to uncover root causes and understand end-to-end system behavior in cloud applications.

Learn the basics of encryption, turning plaintext into cipher text with a key and algorithm, and understand key material, symmetric and asymmetric approaches, and the role of decryption.

Compare symmetric and asymmetric encryption, detailing single-key versus public-private key pairs, and explain encryption in transit with TLS and encryption at rest with AWS KMS and data keys.

Explore disaster recovery by applying prevention, anticipation, and mitigation to maintain availability and learn how RPO and RTO define recovery goals.

Compare rpo and rto, and see how backup frequency and business criticality determine data loss and the speed of recovery for disaster scenarios.

Understand common recovery strategies, led by backup and restore, with the 3 to 1 rule, two media types, and offsite copies, including cloud and cross-region replication options.

Implement pilot light recovery by keeping a small, always-on footprint with ami templates and replication, promote the database to primary, and switch DNS to restore quickly via automation.

Apply a fully working low capacity standby using a prebuilt AMI and automated auto scaling, promote on-prem database to primary, and route traffic via Route 53 DNS and policy-driven failover.

Explore multi-site active active disaster recovery across on-prem and cloud, with DNS routing and automatic failover. Compare backup and restore, pilot light, and active-active strategies, and relate RPO and RTO.

Learn how DNS translates domain names into IP addresses, navigating root servers and TLDs to reach authoritative servers like Route 53, with caching at the ISP and local machine.

Explore how DHCP assigns IP addresses automatically from a pool, using MAC addresses and leases, via broadcast discovery and the Dora sequence.

Learn the fundamentals of authentication, authorization, and accounting, with real-world examples like ATM and passport controls, and explore how AWS IAM and CloudTrail enable secure cloud access and auditing.