Twenty flashcards covering the vocabulary and architecture of public cloud, with AWS and Azure service equivalents shown side by side. Includes the service and deployment models, the shared responsibility model, regions and availability zones, elasticity and s...
Twenty flashcards covering the vocabulary and architecture of public cloud, with AWS and Azure service equivalents shown side by side. Includes the service and deployment models, the shared responsibility model, regions and availability zones, elasticity and scaling, compute and storage options, networking, IAM, serverless, containers, infrastructure as code and cost models. Preparation for AWS Cloud Practitioner and Azure AZ-900.
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On-demand delivery of computing resources — servers, storage, databases, networking and software — over the internet, with pay-as-you-go pricing and no capital hardware purchase.
IaaS: you manage OS and applications (EC2, Azure VM). PaaS: provider manages the platform, you deploy code (Elastic Beanstalk, App Service). SaaS: you consume finished software (Microsoft 365).
Public, private, hybrid (public plus private connected) and community (shared by related organisations).
The provider secures the cloud infrastructure; the customer secures what they put in the cloud — data, access management, OS patching and application configuration.
A Region is a geographic area containing multiple data centres. An Availability Zone is one or more isolated data centres within a Region, allowing fault-tolerant designs.
Elasticity is automatic short-term adjustment of capacity to match demand. Scalability is the longer-term ability to grow to handle increased load.
Vertical (scale up) adds CPU or RAM to one instance and usually needs downtime. Horizontal (scale out) adds more instances and is the cloud-native approach.
AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and Azure Virtual Machines — both IaaS compute with a choice of instance sizes and families.
AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service) and Azure Blob Storage — durable, virtually unlimited storage for unstructured data, accessed by API rather than mounted.
Object: flat namespace of items with metadata (S3). Block: raw volumes attached to an instance (EBS, Managed Disks). File: shared hierarchical file systems over SMB or NFS (EFS, Azure Files).
AWS RDS (Relational Database Service) and Azure SQL Database — the provider handles patching, backups, replication and failover.
Running code without provisioning servers, billed per execution and scaled automatically. AWS Lambda and Azure Functions.
A logically isolated private network within the cloud where you define IP ranges, subnets, route tables and gateways. Called VPC in AWS and VNet in Azure.
Identity and Access Management controls authentication and authorisation through users, groups, roles and policies, and is the mechanism for enforcing least privilege.
Distributes incoming traffic across multiple healthy targets to improve availability and performance, removing failed instances from rotation automatically.
A service that adds or removes instances automatically based on metrics such as CPU utilisation or request count, maintaining performance while controlling cost.
A Content Delivery Network caches content at global edge locations to reduce latency. AWS CloudFront and Azure CDN / Front Door.
CapEx is upfront capital spend on owned hardware. OpEx is ongoing operational spend — the cloud model, which shifts cost to consumption-based billing.
Defining and provisioning infrastructure through version-controlled machine-readable files, giving repeatable and auditable deployments. Tools: CloudFormation, ARM/Bicep, Terraform.
RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is the maximum acceptable downtime. RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is the maximum acceptable data loss, measured in time.
