AWS / GCP / Azure
The three hyperscale cloud platforms that host, run, and scale virtually every modern application and digital service.
What it is
About AWS / GCP / Azure
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure are the three dominant public cloud providers. Each offers hundreds of managed services — compute (EC2, Compute Engine, Azure VMs), storage (S3, Cloud Storage, Azure Blob), databases (RDS, Cloud SQL, Azure SQL), serverless functions (Lambda, Cloud Functions, Azure Functions), container orchestration (EKS, GKE, AKS), and AI/ML services. AWS holds the largest global market share; Azure dominates in Microsoft-ecosystem enterprises; GCP is preferred in data-heavy and machine-learning workloads. For most engineering teams, "using the cloud" means provisioning, configuring, monitoring, and scaling services across one or more of these platforms. In practice, a Software Engineer working on a cloud-native product spends time provisioning infrastructure through the console or CLI, reviewing cost dashboards to spot unexpected charges, deploying containerised services, configuring auto-scaling rules, and investigating incidents through logging services such as CloudWatch, Cloud Logging, or Azure Monitor. The skills transfer meaningfully between platforms — the underlying concepts of VPCs, IAM, managed databases, and serverless are shared even though the naming and interfaces differ.
What you can do with it
Capabilities
Launch an EC2 instance, attach an IAM role with the minimum required permissions, and SSH into it to verify the configuration before exposing it to production traffic
Set up an S3 bucket with versioning enabled, configure a lifecycle rule to move objects to Glacier after 90 days, and attach a bucket policy restricting access to a specific IAM role
Deploy a containerised application to EKS or GKE, configure a horizontal pod autoscaler, and watch it spin up additional replicas under simulated load
Create a CloudWatch alarm that fires when API error rate exceeds 1% and routes the alert to an SNS topic connected to the on-call Slack channel
Review the cost explorer dashboard, identify the service driving a 30% month-on-month cost increase, and create a budget alert at 80% of projected spend
Use AWS IAM Access Analyzer to review resource policies across an account and identify S3 buckets or roles with broader permissions than intended
How to learn it
Learning Resources
AWS Skill Builder (skillbuilder.aws) — free tier includes the Cloud Practitioner Essentials course; the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam is the standard entry-level credential
Google Cloud Skills Boost (cloudskillsboost.google) — free labs with temporary cloud environments; the Associate Cloud Engineer learning path is the GCP equivalent of the AWS practitioner track
Microsoft Learn (learn.microsoft.com) — Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) course is free and includes sandbox environments
The AWS Free Tier, GCP free trial, and Azure free trial all provide real environments to practise in — create an account and follow a hands-on tutorial rather than watching videos
Pro Tip
Set up billing alerts on day one. Every cloud platform makes it easy to provision resources and easy to forget to turn them off. A $5/month learning environment can become a $500 bill if you leave a GPU instance running over a long weekend.
Skills that use this tool
Roles that use this tool
Alternatives