Cloud Architecture: full course guide
Vendor-neutral cloud architecture: availability mathematics, multi-region tradeoffs, network and egress economics, identity boundaries, FinOps allocation and the landing zones that decide how an organisation scales.
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What is inside this guide
01The Cloud Architect’s Remit
- What a Cloud Architect Owns That an Engineer Does Not
- Turning Requirements into Constraints and Tradeoffs
- Reference Architectures and When to Leave Them
- Sizing, Capacity and the Cost of Being Wrong
- Documenting Decisions People Will Inherit
02Availability and the Mathematics of Failure
- SLIs, SLOs, SLAs and Error Budgets
- Composite Availability Across Dependent Services
- Redundancy, Correlated Failure and Shared Fate
- Blast Radius, Cells and Bulkheads
- Graceful Degradation and Load Shedding
03Multi-Region, Data Gravity and Consistency
- Active-Passive, Active-Active and What Each Actually Buys
- Replication, Consistency and the Cost of Agreement
- Request Routing, Global Load Balancing and Counting Traffic
- Failover, Failback and Testing the Thing You Bought
- Latency Budgets and Placing Data Near Its Users
04Networking, Boundaries and the Economics of Egress
- Network Topology: Segments, Peering and Transit
- Load Balancers, Gateways and Where Traffic Is Attributed
- Egress, Data Transfer and the Bill Nobody Modelled
- Private Connectivity and Hybrid Reachability
- DNS, Service Discovery and Failure at the Edge
05Identity, Security and the Trust Boundary
- Identity as the Primary Perimeter
- Least Privilege at Scale: Roles, Policies and Boundaries
- Workload Identity and Eliminating Long-Lived Credentials
- Encryption, Key Custody and What It Actually Protects
- Tenancy, Isolation and Regulated Boundaries
06Cost Architecture and FinOps
- Unit Economics: Cost per Request, Tenant and Feature
- Allocating Shared Cost Without Double Counting
- Commitments, Reservations and Coverage Accounting
- Showback, Chargeback and Changing Engineering Behaviour
- Cost as a Design Constraint, Not a Cleanup Task
07Landing Zones, Migration and Organisational Scale
- Account and Subscription Topology as an Architecture Decision
- Landing Zones, Guardrails and Preventive Controls
- Migration Patterns and Choosing Honestly Between Them
- Platform Teams, Paved Roads and Self-Service
- Evolution: Reviewing, Deprecating and Paying Down Architecture
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