Cloud and Platform Skills

Working with cloud platforms and the tools built on them, aimed at practical day-to-day use.

What this course covers

Working confidently with cloud platforms and the tools businesses actually run on, treated as a practical matter rather than an abstract one.

Most people's relationship with "the cloud" is that things live somewhere they cannot see, cost money on a card they do not control, and occasionally stop working for reasons nobody can explain. This course is about replacing that with an accurate mental picture.

What you will learn

• What is actually happening when something runs in the cloud
• The main service types, and what each is genuinely for
• Where your data physically lives and why that sometimes matters legally
• Accounts, users and permissions, and how to avoid one login owning everything
• Costs: what drives them, and what causes an unexpected bill
• Deploying something and getting it to a real address
• Domains, DNS and certificates, demystified
• Monitoring, logs, and finding out why something is not responding
• Backups, and the difference between having one and having a tested one

Who this is for

• Developers who can build but not deploy
• IT and operations staff taking on cloud responsibilities
• Anyone who has inherited a cloud account nobody documented
• Business owners paying cloud bills they cannot interpret
• Students who want practical grounding rather than vendor marketing

Understanding the bill

Cloud costs surprise people because they are usage-based and largely invisible until they arrive.

So we cover what actually drives cost, which is rarely what people assume. Data transfer out is frequently more expensive than storage. Something left running by mistake costs the same as something being used. A misconfigured setting can quietly multiply a bill overnight.

Knowing where the meter is running is most of cost control, and it is not difficult once someone has pointed at the right things.

Permissions, before it goes wrong

A large proportion of cloud incidents are permission problems rather than attacks. One root account everyone shares. A key committed into code. A storage location made public for a quick test and never made private again.

We cover setting this up sensibly from the start: separate accounts per person, minimum necessary permissions, and no shared credentials. It is straightforward when done early and painful to retrofit after an organisation has grown around bad habits.

Finding out why it is broken

The practical skill that separates confidence from anxiety is being able to investigate rather than guess.

Where are the logs. What does this error mean. Is it my code, the configuration, or the platform. Is it down for everyone or only for me. These are answerable questions and knowing how to answer them changes an outage from frightening to routine.

Where it leads

Enough to deploy and run things yourself, understand what you are being billed for, and investigate problems rather than escalate them immediately.