Foundational explainers on what cloud computing actually is, how providers structure their infrastructure, and how it compares to running your own hardware.
Cloud identity and access management (IAM) controls who and what can do what to which resources; the principle of least privilege means granting only the specific permissions a given identity actually needs to do its job, no more — a standard that's simple to state and consistently hard to maintain as systems grow, which is exactly why over-permissioning is one of the most common cloud security gaps.
A virtual private cloud (VPC) is a logically isolated section of a public cloud provider's network, defined by an address range you control, subdivided into subnets, and connected to the internet or other networks only through gateways and route tables you explicitly configure — the foundation almost every other piece of cloud network security is built on top of.
A load balancer distributes incoming traffic across multiple backend servers so no single one is overwhelmed; layer 4 load balancers route based on network-level information alone and are fast and simple, while layer 7 load balancers read the actual application request content and can route far more intelligently, at the cost of more processing overhead.
Block storage presents raw, addressable chunks of storage that an operating system formats and manages, typically for a single attached server; file storage organizes data in a shared hierarchical directory structure multiple systems can access at once; object storage stores whole files as objects with metadata, accessed over HTTP APIs, and scales far beyond what either of the other two models is designed for.
Multi-cloud means deliberately running workloads across more than one provider; it offers real benefits — avoiding lock-in, meeting specific compliance needs, negotiating leverage — but each of those benefits comes with a genuine operational cost in complexity, and 'multi-cloud by accident' from unmanaged sprawl is a liability, not a strategy.
A content delivery network caches copies of content across many geographically distributed servers, so a user's request is served from a location physically close to them instead of a single origin server, which is what actually reduces latency — and a CDN also commonly absorbs traffic spikes and some categories of attack traffic before they reach your origin at all.
The core trade-off between cloud and on-premises infrastructure is capital versus operational spending and fixed versus elastic capacity; cloud shifts operational burden to the provider and makes scaling near-instant, at the cost of ongoing usage-based billing and less low-level control.
Cloud providers organize infrastructure into geographic regions, each built from multiple physically isolated availability zones; where you place workloads within that structure directly determines your latency to users, your resilience to data center failures, and often your bill.
Cloud computing is on-demand, self-service access to shared, elastic computing resources billed by usage; IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS describe how much of the underlying stack the provider manages for you versus how much you manage yourself.