The cloud is someone else's data centre behind an API, rented by the second and billed by the byte. That one sentence explains most of what matters: everything is programmable, everything fails independently somewhere, and everything costs money while it exists. A frontend engineer who understands those three facts can read an architecture diagram, argue with a platform team, debug a 502 from the load balancer and not be surprised by the bill.
Nine parts. The cloud as a whole and the shared responsibility line; the architect's view of failure domains, availability math and cost; networking properly, following one packet from a phone in Lagos to a container in a private subnet; compute from VMs to functions; Docker down to namespaces and layers; storage and data services; identity and secrets; the same design built on AWS and GCP; and observability with the bill treated as a metric.
the cloud as a wholeRegions, zones, the shared responsibility model, and what you actually pay for.
the architect's viewFailure domains, availability math, cost models and the well-architected pillars.
networking, properlyVPCs, subnets, routes, gateways, security groups, private endpoints, DNS, load balancers, CDN, and the packet's path.
computeVMs, containers and serverless, when to pick each, and how each scales.
DockerImages, layers, the build, the runtime, networking, volumes: what a container actually is.
storage and dataObject, block and file; managed databases; caches; queues and streams.
identity and secretsIAM models, roles and policies, secrets management, workload identity.
AWS and GCP, costOne design on both clouds, then logs, metrics, traces, alerts and the bill.
Followed by Infrastructure, SRE and Distributed SystemsThis course is the foundation: what the cloud is made of. Infrastructure and Platforms covers how to run it at scale (IaC, Kubernetes, CI/CD, platform teams); SRE covers how to keep it reliable; Distributed Systems covers the theory underneath. The older Deploying The Core Bank module applies all of it to one bank on AWS and GCP.