Cloud Services and Architecture
The service models and building blocks every cloud runs on: IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, plus compute, storage, databases, and networking, and the modern patterns built on top of them.
Cloud Services and Architecture is where Cloud Computing Fundamentals moves from concepts to the services a provider actually sells. You already know what the cloud is and why it exists. Here you learn how that gets packaged into services, and what building blocks almost every cloud application is made of.
The domain opens with the three classic service models and how much control each one hands back to you versus the provider. It then works through the core services every cloud runs on, compute, storage, databases, and networking, before closing with the modern architecture patterns teams build on top of them today.
What This Domain Covers
- IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, the three classic cloud service models, and how to tell them apart in a real scenario
- regions and availability zones, and how providers use them to keep services running
- compute services, from virtual machines to managed and serverless compute
- storage services, and the tradeoffs between object, block, and file storage
- databases in the cloud, including managed relational and NoSQL options
- cloud networking basics: virtual networks, subnets, and how traffic reaches your resources
- modern architecture patterns: serverless computing, containers and microservices, and infrastructure as code
Why It Matters
Every cloud decision later in this course assumes you can name the service model and the building block involved. A job listing that asks for experience with managed databases and serverless compute is not testing trivia. It is checking whether you can talk about the services a cloud team touches every day.
The service-model boundary matters most for exam-style questions: a large share of them come down to spotting whether a scenario needs the control of IaaS, the convenience of PaaS, or the hands-off simplicity of SaaS. Once you can also picture how compute, storage, databases, and networking fit together, the security and reliability domain that follows has real infrastructure to attach its rules to, instead of abstract advice.