Cloud Computing

Renting Compute as a Utility

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What cloud computing actually is — the NIST five essentials, the IaaS/PaaS/SaaS responsibility stack, elasticity, regions and availability zones, serverless functions, and the real trade-offs.

By the end, you can

Recite and explain the five NIST characteristics of cloud computing.
Classify a service (EC2, Heroku, Gmail) as IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS and justify which layers the provider manages.
Describe the CapEx-to-OpEx shift and explain how elasticity enables it.
Distinguish a region from an availability zone and explain why multi-AZ deployment improves resilience.
Explain what a serverless cold start is, why it happens, and how warm reuse avoids it.
Identify vendor lock-in, egress fees, and finite limits as real costs that must be weighed against cloud benefits.

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