Modern Cloud Architectures

Everything earlier in this domain covered how a cloud provider packages compute, storage, and networking. This topic covers how modern teams actually build and ship applications on top of those services, the patterns behind almost every product you use today.

What This Topic Covers

• Serverless computing: what "serverless" really means, the event-driven lifecycle of a function, cold starts versus warm starts, and the real cost math behind pay-per-use billing
• Containers and microservices: what a container packages and why it starts in seconds, the difference between a monolith and a microservices architecture, and what a container orchestrator like Kubernetes adds once a team runs more containers than it can track by hand
• DevOps and infrastructure as code: how development and operations merged into one continuous practice, what each stage of a CI/CD pipeline catches before a change reaches production, and how declaring infrastructure in code instead of a console keeps environments consistent

Why It Matters

A job posting that asks for experience with serverless functions, containers, or CI/CD pipelines is describing how almost every modern cloud team actually ships software, not a specialized niche. These 3 patterns build directly on the service models and core services from earlier in this domain: a serverless function is still compute, a container still needs somewhere to run, and infrastructure as code still provisions the same networking and storage this domain already covered.

They also set up the rest of the course. Reliable, secure delivery depends on the discipline this topic introduces: a pipeline that tests every change before it reaches users, and infrastructure defined in code instead of manual console clicks, are exactly what make the security and reliability practices in the next domain enforceable the same way across every environment a team runs.