What you will learn
- Compare service models
- Understand regions and AZs
- Reason about latency and redundancy
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The basics, in plain English
The cloud just means renting computers in someone else’s data center over the internet instead of buying your own. Companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft own huge buildings full of servers and let you use them by the hour. A region is the physical location of one of those buildings, like a city, and you pick one close to your users so things load fast.
- Cloud
- Renting computers and storage over the internet instead of owning the hardware yourself.
- Provider
- A company that rents you cloud resources, such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
- Region
- A geographic area where a provider has data centers, like “US East” or “Europe West”.
- Availability Zone
- A separate building inside a region, so if one loses power the others keep running.
- IaaS / PaaS / SaaS
- Three levels of renting: raw machines, a ready-made platform, or finished software you just log into.
- On-demand
- You turn resources on when you need them and pay only for what you use.
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Shapes of cloud
IaaS gives raw compute, PaaS manages the platform, SaaS is a finished product. Regions contain availability zones for redundancy.
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