Infrastructure & Platforms · core
Cloud Infrastructure
Regions, zones, networks, compute, managed storage, identity, load balancing, and control planes.
Mental model
Cloud systems are distributed resource managers with failure domains. Architecture should make placement, identity, state ownership, and regional recovery explicit.
How to study Cloud Infrastructure
Begin by restating the mental model in your own words, then connect it to a concrete system you have built or operated. Name the mechanism, the constraint it addresses, and the trade-off it introduces. Use Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing (UCB/EECS-2009-28), Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing, USENIX SREcon24 Americas — Gray Failure: The Achilles' Heel of Cloud-Scale Systems to check details, but close the source before writing your explanation. Retrieval is the learning step; rereading is only preparation.
Next, compare Cloud Infrastructure with Containers & Kubernetes. Ask what changes in correctness, latency, resource use, operability, and failure recovery. Complete Design exercise: Cloud Infrastructure and preserve the command, input, output, and one failed attempt as evidence. Finish by explaining the idea without jargon to someone who has not studied the track.
Proof of understanding
- Explain the mechanism from first principles and identify the state it reads or changes.
- Give one situation where the concept is the right choice and one where it is not.
- Predict a realistic failure mode before running the drill, then compare the prediction with evidence.
- Connect the result to a roadmap or build artifact instead of treating the concept as isolated trivia.
Learn from primary sources
- Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing (UCB/EECS-2009-28) (doc)
- Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing (doc)
- USENIX SREcon24 Americas — Gray Failure: The Achilles' Heel of Cloud-Scale Systems (video)
- Large-scale cluster management at Google with Borg (EuroSys 2015) (paper)
- Kubernetes — Cluster Architecture (doc)
- AWS Builders Library (doc)
Practice and explain it back
Design exercise: Cloud Infrastructure
Regions, zones, networks, compute, managed storage, identity, load balancing, and control planes. Implement designOutline() returning non-empty values for: failureDomains, statePlacement, recoveryPlan. Each value must name a concrete mechanism or decision.
Expected evidence: A design outline with failureDomains, statePlacement, recoveryPlan plus an explicit failure mode or trade-off.
Open the interactive drill →Review prompts
- What is a failure domain, and why does multi-AZ buy something multi-instance does not?
Build evidence
Synthesize: Infrastructure & Platforms
Design and operate a reproducible, observable, fault-tolerant platform for untrusted workloads. Produce one working system, benchmark, or evidence-backed design that integrates the path.
- Implements or precisely models the core mechanisms from all three milestones
- Includes at least one injected failure or adversarial case and demonstrates recovery
- Reports quality, latency, resource, reliability, or usability measurements relevant to the domain
- Ships a concise architecture note explaining decisions, trade-offs, and remaining risks
Prerequisites
None assigned yet.