Cloud fundamentals quiz (AWS and Azure)

Infrastructure as a service gives you virtual servers, storage and networks; you manage the operating system and everything above it.

The provider secures the cloud itself (data centres, hardware, core services). Customers secure what they put in it: data, identities, access and configuration.

A region contains several Availability Zones, each with independent power and networking, so you can design for high availability.

A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is AWS’s private network; Azure calls it a Virtual Network (VNet).

NSGs hold allow and deny rules for subnets and network interfaces. AWS security groups do a similar job (stateful, allow rules only).

Most incidents come from customer mistakes: public storage buckets, weak identities and overly broad permissions.

Protect the most powerful account with strong MFA, keep its use rare and give everyone else least-privilege accounts or roles.

AWS Key Management Service creates and controls encryption keys. Azure’s equivalent is Key Vault.

Serverless functions such as AWS Lambda or Azure Functions run on demand, and you pay per execution.

CloudTrail records management API activity. In Azure, the Activity Log plays a similar role. Keep these logs safe and monitored.

Software as a service: the provider runs the whole application; you manage users and data.

Amazon S3 is object storage. EC2 is virtual machines, RDS managed databases and Route 53 DNS.

Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) handles identities, sign-in and conditional access.

Auto scaling adjusts capacity to demand. A load balancer spreads traffic across the instances.

Budgets and alerts warn you early. Our FinOps notes cover tagging and right-sizing too.

A region is a geographic location with multiple isolated availability zones for resilience.

Roles and managed identities give short-lived credentials automatically, with no long-lived keys to leak.

Hybrid cloud connects on-premises infrastructure and public cloud, often with VPN or dedicated links.

Defining infrastructure in code makes builds repeatable, reviewable and easy to roll back.

Block public access first, then review logs to understand what was exposed and whether you must notify anyone.