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Skill Guide

Cloud Platform Basics (AWS, GCP, Azure)

Cloud Platform Basics encompasses the core knowledge of AWS, GCP, and Azure for provisioning, managing, and utilizing fundamental infrastructure services (compute, storage, networking, databases) and their associated operational models.

It enables organizations to shift from capital-intensive, rigid on-premises infrastructure to scalable, pay-as-you-go operational expenditure, accelerating innovation and time-to-market. This directly reduces upfront costs, enhances business agility, and allows technical teams to focus on product development rather than infrastructure management.
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How to Learn Cloud Platform Basics (AWS, GCP, Azure)

Focus on understanding the core service triad: Compute (EC2/VMs, Lambda), Storage (S3/Blob), and Networking (VPC/VNet). Build foundational knowledge of the shared responsibility model and basic IAM concepts. Use the free tiers of all three platforms to launch a simple virtual machine and a static website.
Transition to designing and deploying multi-tier applications. Master a primary platform (e.g., AWS) while understanding equivalent services in others. Focus on cost management (using cost explorers and budgets), basic security groups/firewalls, and managed database services (RDS, Cloud SQL). A common mistake is over-provisioning resources; learn to right-size instances.
Architect for resilience, high availability, and multi-region deployment. Master advanced networking (peering, transit gateways), serverless orchestration (Step Functions, Dataflow), and infrastructure as code (IaC) at scale. Develop strategic skills in cloud financial management (FinOps), vendor negotiation, and designing exit strategies to avoid vendor lock-in.

Practice Projects

Beginner
Project

Deploy a Three-Tier Web Application on a Single Cloud Provider

Scenario

Deploy a classic web application with a frontend (web server), backend (application logic), and database layer on AWS, GCP, or Azure, ensuring each tier is in its own subnet within a VPC.

How to Execute
1. Use the console or CLI to create a VPC with three subnets (public, private, database). 2. Launch an EC2/VM instance in the public subnet for the web server, installing Nginx or Apache. 3. Launch another instance in the private subnet for the application backend. 4. Provision a managed database service (RDS, Cloud SQL) in the database subnet. 5. Configure security groups to allow only necessary traffic flow between tiers.
Intermediate
Project

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Migration and Cost Optimization

Scenario

Manually deployed resources are becoming unmanageable and costly. You must convert an existing environment into Terraform code and implement a cost-saving strategy.

How to Execute
1. Use a tool like `terraformer` to import existing cloud resources into Terraform HCL. 2. Refactor the generated code into reusable modules (e.g., for a compute instance, a database). 3. Analyze cost reports and identify idle resources or over-provisioned instances. 4. Implement IaC to replace manual instances with auto-scaling groups and leverage spot/preemptible instances for non-critical workloads.
Advanced
Project

Design and Deploy a Multi-Region, Active-Active Application

Scenario

Design a global application with strict low-latency requirements and zero planned downtime, requiring active traffic distribution across two or more cloud regions.

How to Execute
1. Architect global traffic management using AWS Global Accelerator, GCP Global Load Balancer, or Azure Front Door. 2. Design data replication strategy: choose between synchronous (complex, high consistency) or asynchronous (simpler, eventual consistency) replication for your database (e.g., DynamoDB Global Tables, Cloud Spanner, Cosmos DB). 3. Deploy the entire stack (compute, storage, DB) in two regions using IaC modules. 4. Implement comprehensive health checks and failover automation. 5. Conduct chaos engineering tests (e.g., simulate a regional outage) to validate resilience.

Tools & Frameworks

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) & Orchestration

Terraform (HashiCorp)AWS CloudFormationPulumi

Use Terraform for multi-cloud provisioning due to its declarative syntax and provider ecosystem. Use native tools like CloudFormation for deep integration with a single cloud. Pulumi allows IaC using general-purpose programming languages (Python, Go).

Cost Management & Governance

AWS Cost Explorer & BudgetsGCP Billing Reports & Budget AlertsAzure Cost ManagementThird-party tools like CloudHealth or Densify

Implement from day one. Set up budgets and alerts to prevent bill shock. Use cost allocation tags to track spending by team/project. Analyze reports monthly to identify and eliminate waste (idle IPs, unattached volumes).

Security & Compliance Frameworks

AWS Well-Architected FrameworkGCP Architecture FrameworkAzure Cloud Adoption FrameworkCIS Benchmarks

Use the provider's Well-Architected/Framework pillars (Security, Reliability, etc.) as a design review checklist. Implement CIS Benchmarks for hardening OS and cloud service configurations. These frameworks provide structured, best-practice approaches to security and compliance.

Interview Questions

Answer Strategy

Test understanding of IaaS vs. PaaS trade-offs and stateful workload management. The answer must reject managed platform services (like ECS/Fargate) in favor of IaaS with persistent storage. 'For a stateful monolith needing local disk, I'd use EC2 instances with instance store volumes or EBS volumes provisioned as io2 for high performance. I'd place them in an Auto Scaling group with a stateful lifecycle policy to preserve volumes on termination, and use an Application Load Balancer for traffic distribution. For high availability, I'd deploy across multiple Availability Zones, using EBS Multi-Attach where supported or a distributed file system like EFS for shared state.'

Answer Strategy

Tests incident response and proactive governance skills. Structure answer in phases. 'Immediate response: 1) Verify deletion via CloudTrail logs. 2) If versioning was enabled, use the S3 console to restore deleted objects from previous versions. 3) If versioning was off, initiate recovery from cross-region replication or our backup vault. Long-term prevention: 1) Enable versioning and MFA Delete on all production buckets. 2) Implement Service Control Policies (SCPs) or IAM policies with explicit Deny for `s3:DeleteBucket` and `s3:DeleteObject` on production resources. 3) Enable S3 Object Lock for compliance-critical data.'

Careers That Require Cloud Platform Basics (AWS, GCP, Azure)

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