Chapter 1 checkpoint
You've built the mental model the rest of the guide stands on. Before moving to the core services, lock it in. Recall the throughline first, then take the quiz.
The throughline
- The cloud is rented computing — real servers in real data centers, sliced by virtualization, provisioned instantly over an API, billed by usage. The IaaS / PaaS / SaaS ladder says how much of the stack you keep versus hand to the provider.
- Shared responsibility splits security into of the cloud (the provider's hardware, network, hypervisor) and in the cloud (your data, access, configuration, and — on IaaS — OS and app). If you can configure it, you own it.
- Geography: a region is a geographic cluster (distance + data-residency law); availability zones are independent buildings within a region (spread across them for resilience); the edge is a huge tier of caching locations a CDN uses for proximity.
- Three doors, one API: console (learn), CLI (repeat/script), SDK/API (programmatic), then IaC (declare the whole system). ClickOps is for learning, not production.
- Big-3 mental model: AWS, GCP, and Azure are ~90% the same primitives in different brand names. Learn the concept; the translation table handles the vocabulary.
Quiz
Chapter 1 — Cloud Foundations
Pass to unlock the Next button belowPassed? You have the foundation the entire field is built on. Next we open up the primitives themselves — compute, storage, databases, networking, and identity — the actual services you'll wire together to build anything.