Cloud Engineering¶
This track focuses on the cloud decisions that affect backend services after deployment: identity and access, network boundaries, compute, storage, managed data services, queues, resilience, security, and cost. The goal is to understand the operational responsibility behind a service choice, not just memorize product names.
What to work through¶
- IAM roles, least privilege, service identities, and secret handling
- Network segmentation, routing, DNS, load balancing, and private connectivity
- Compute choices across virtual machines, containers, and serverless services
- Object storage, managed databases, queues, backups, and disaster recovery
- Monitoring, capacity, availability, and cost controls
AWS IAM for backend workloads¶
- AWS IAM for backend workloads — workload roles, temporary credentials, trust policies, least-privilege permissions, and policy evaluation.
AWS VPC networking¶
- AWS VPC networking for backend services — subnet tiers, route tables, security groups, NAT gateways, VPC endpoints, DNS, multi-AZ ingress, and reachability troubleshooting.
How to evaluate a cloud service¶
For each option, identify what the provider manages and what the application team still owns. Consider failure domains, data durability, access boundaries, scaling limits, regional dependencies, recovery objectives, and cost under normal and peak load.
Learning path¶
Start with identity and networking, then compare compute and storage choices. Move on to managed databases and messaging, followed by observability, backup, recovery, and cost-aware architecture. The editorial roadmap tracks the planned hands-on examples.