Intermediate concepts in Cloud Platforms, page 4
ML Inference Endpoint: The API for Your Model
An ML inference endpoint is the stable API URL your application calls to get predictions. It separates the public URL from the underlying model, letting you swap models without changing client code.
Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE): Your Internal Cloud Guides
A Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) is your company's internal cloud consulting team, centralizing expertise to guide adoption. It creates reusable patterns, manages costs, and ensures security, helping large orgs scale.
Cloud Landing Zone: A Blueprint for Cloud Environments
A Cloud Landing Zone is a pre-configured, secure foundation for your cloud applications, like a city grid with utilities ready for new buildings. It provides shared services like networking and identity, ensuring consistency for large organizations.
What is Cloud Native Architecture?
Cloud Native refers to a collection of practices and open-source projects, like Kubernetes, governed by the CNCF. It's used by enterprises to build modern products and services.
Cloud Governance: Rules for Your Cloud Kingdom
Cloud governance is like city planning for your cloud, setting automated rules to prevent chaos. It's used to control costs by blocking expensive VMs and enforce security with required settings.
Automate Storage Costs with Lifecycle Policies
Object storage lifecycle policies are automated rules that move or delete data as it ages to save money. They're ideal for logs or backups, transitioning them to cheaper "cold" storage over time.
Cloud Monitoring: Metrics, Time Series, and Resources
Cloud monitoring metrics are numerical measurements of a resource over time. They are used to build dashboards, trigger alerts when a threshold is crossed, and analyze performance for services like VMs or databases.
Cloud Alerting: Your System's Automated Smoke Detector
Cloud alerting is your system's smoke detector, watching key metrics and screaming when something's wrong before it becomes a fire. It's used to flag high CPU, failing health checks, or security anomalies.
Data Swamp: When a Data Lake Becomes Unusable
A data swamp is a data lake turned digital landfill, so disorganized that finding useful information is nearly impossible. This happens when data is dumped without metadata or quality checks, making it a costly, insecure liability instead of a valuable asset.
ML Model Registry: A Version Control System for Models
A model registry is like Git for machine learning models: a central hub to version, store, and manage them. It's crucial for MLOps, letting teams track which version is in production, compare performance, and roll back. The footgun is using it as just storage.
Cloud Operating Model: Your Org's Playbook for the Cloud
A Cloud Operating Model is your org's playbook for balancing new cloud capabilities with existing systems. It's used to manage the transition to the cloud with minimal disruption. The footgun is assuming your old processes will work unmodified.
Cloud Disaster Recovery: Planning for Failure
Cloud DR isn't about backups; it's a business continuity plan defining acceptable downtime (RTO) and data loss (RPO). It's for when a whole region fails or a bad deploy corrupts data. The footgun is having a plan but never testing it, creating false security.
Kappa Architecture Unifies Batch and Stream
Kappa treats batch as a special case of streaming: store every event in an immutable log, compute views in real time, and replay the log when logic changes. It removes Lambda's dual codebase but forces you to pay for infinite retention and replay costs.
We are hiring for this. Every open role lists the topics its interview covers, so you can prepare for the real thing rather than guessing.
See open roles