☁️ Free cloud course: understanding AWS, Azure and GCP
Welcome to the most pedagogical cloud discovery course. In 7 short lessons, you will understand exactly what cloud computing is, why it has shaken up enterprise IT since 2006, and how to choose between the three big worldwide providers.
What this course aims for: answering once and for all the questions "what is the cloud really?", "IaaS, PaaS or SaaS?", "AWS or Azure or GCP?", "why is my cloud bill exploding?", "what is an availability zone?" — without marketing and without jargon.
What this course does not do: teach you how to click in the AWS console or type az or gcloud commands. This practical mastery is the subject of our Premium cloud courses.
What you will discover
Course content
| No. | Lesson | Main objective | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The problem the cloud solves | Understanding why owning your servers becomes a handicap | 6 min |
| 2 | What is the cloud really? | NIST definition, history since 2006, myths to dismiss | 7 min |
| 3 | IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and serverless | The service models and where your responsibility ends | 8 min |
| 4 | Regions, zones and high availability | The geography of the cloud and how to design for resilience | 7 min |
| 5 | AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud | Honest comparison of the three giants + the European players | 7 min |
| 6 | Understanding and controlling costs | Billing models, classic traps, FinOps levers | 6 min |
| 7 | Real use cases + FAQ | Netflix, Spotify, public sector + 14 frequent questions | 5 min |
| 8 | Quiz and attestation | Validate what you learned with 5 corrected questions | 3 min |
Is this course for you?
- You are a developer and you deploy to a cloud without really understanding what happens behind it.
- You are a system administrator used to physical servers and you must migrate to the cloud.
- You are in a career change to tech and the cloud appears in all the job postings that interest you.
- You are a project manager, product owner, CFO or CTO and you want to understand why the cloud bill increases every month.
- You are preparing an AWS Cloud Practitioner, Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) or Google Cloud Digital Leader certification.
No heavy technical prerequisites. Basic knowledge of Linux helps, but is not essential for this discovery course.
Course outline at a glance
What you will know at the end
No commands to remember. At the end of the course, you will know how to:
- Explain in one clear sentence what cloud computing is.
- Distinguish IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and serverless without hesitation.
- Understand the shared responsibility model and know what falls on you.
- Design a resilient architecture by distributing over several availability zones.
- Compare AWS, Azure and Google Cloud with real arguments.
- Identify the five traps that make a cloud bill explode.
- Approach a fundamental certification (AWS Cloud Practitioner, AZ-900) with solid foundations.
⏱️ Estimated duration
About 45 minutes of reading in total. Each lesson is standalone — you can read one per day, or go through everything in one evening.
Prerequisites and recommended companions
Useful prerequisites:
- Linux Discovery — the vast majority of cloud machines run Linux.
- Docker Discovery — containers are omnipresent in the modern cloud.
Natural follow-up after this course:
- Terraform Discovery — provisioning the cloud with code
- Kubernetes Discovery — the standard orchestration layer on top of the cloud
- CI/CD Discovery — automating deployments to the cloud
- Security Discovery — securing a cloud infrastructure
Frequent questions in one answer
What is the cloud in one sentence?
Cloud computing consists of consuming computing resources on demand over the internet — compute, storage, network, databases — from a provider who owns and operates the physical machines, paying only for what you use.
IaaS, PaaS or SaaS?
- IaaS — you rent a bare virtual machine. You manage the OS, the updates, the application security. Example: AWS EC2.
- PaaS — you supply your code, the provider manages the OS and the execution engine. Example: Azure App Service, Google App Engine.
- SaaS — you use a ready-to-use application. Example: Gmail, Salesforce, Slack.
Lesson 3 details everything with a responsibility diagram.
Is the cloud cheaper?
Not systematically. The cloud wins by far on variable, unpredictable or fast-growing workloads. For a workload that is perfectly stable over several years, an amortized dedicated server can cost two to three times less.
The real benefit of the cloud is elasticity, speed and the absence of upfront investment — not necessarily the raw cost. Lesson 6 treats the question in detail.
Should you choose a single provider?
For most organizations, yes — a single main provider. Multi-cloud multiplies the complexity, the required skills and the data transfer costs, for a benefit that is often theoretical.
Multi-cloud is justified in specific cases: a regulatory constraint, a contractual requirement from a customer, or the use of a unique service available at only one player. Lesson 5 develops this point.
Is the cloud secure?
The datacenters of AWS, Azure and GCP are physically better secured than almost all corporate server rooms. The problem is almost never the provider — it is the customer-side configuration.
The very large majority of data leaks in the cloud come from configuration mistakes: a storage bucket left public, an access right that is too broad, an API key committed to Git. This is the shared responsibility model, explained in lesson 3.
Which cloud certification to start with?
The three fundamental certifications, accessible after this course plus a few weeks of practice:
- AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner — about 100 USD.
- Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) — about 99 USD.
- Google Cloud Digital Leader — about 99 USD.
Choose the one from the provider used by your company, or the one you are aiming for. Lesson 7 details the paths.
This discovery course explains how the cloud works, without a console or a command line. To provision real resources, configure virtual networks, manage identities and control costs, explore our paid plans and the Premium Terraform course to drive the cloud with code.
Other discovery courses not to be missed
- Terraform Discovery — creating cloud with code
- Kubernetes Discovery — orchestrating containers on the cloud
- Docker Discovery — the containers the cloud hosts
- CI/CD Discovery — automatically deploying to the cloud
- Ansible Discovery — configuring cloud machines
- Linux Discovery — the OS of most cloud servers
Ready? Start with lesson 1 →