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Cloud Architecture

Cloud architecture is more than selecting cloud services. It is about deciding how applications, data, networks, security boundaries, and operational responsibilities fit together to meet a system's requirements.

The decisions often start with questions such as: Where should workloads run? How should systems communicate? Where should trust boundaries exist? What needs to remain available during a failure? And which capabilities should be centralized versus owned by individual workloads or teams?

Architecture considerations

Cloud designs typically bring together several concerns:

  • Networking and connectivity — VPC design, routing, private connectivity, hybrid networks, DNS, load balancing, and service-to-service communication.
  • Identity and security — workload identity, user access, authorization boundaries, encryption, and least-privilege access.
  • Workload isolation — accounts, VPCs, subnets, security boundaries, and approaches for separating environments or tenants.
  • Availability and recovery — Availability Zone and Region strategy, failure isolation, backup, and disaster recovery.
  • Shared services and governance — deciding which capabilities should be centralized and which should remain with individual application teams.
  • Operations and observability — understanding how systems are monitored, diagnosed, operated, and changed safely.

These concerns rarely exist independently. A networking decision can affect security and availability. Centralizing a service may improve governance while creating a shared dependency. Adding another Region can improve recovery options while increasing data, operational, and cost complexity.

The goal is therefore not to find a universally "best" cloud architecture, but to understand the requirements and make deliberate trade-offs.

Practical architecture

The material in this section will focus on those design decisions rather than simply documenting individual cloud services. Where useful, specific platforms such as AWS are used to show how an architectural approach can be implemented in practice.

Hands-on implementations and validation exercises are maintained separately in the Labs section so that architectural reasoning remains distinct from platform-specific configuration.