Topic overview
Study the core primitives every provider offers: virtual machines and serverless compute, object storage, managed relational/NoSQL databases, virtual networks and load balancers, and identity and access management (IAM) for permissions.
Core concepts
Compute spectrum from VMs (EC2/Azure VMs/Compute Engine) to containers (ECS/AKS/GKE) to serverless (Lambda/Functions/Cloud Functions); object storage (S3/Blob/Cloud Storage) for unstructured data; managed databases that remove operational overhead; least-privilege IAM roles and policies; and pay-for-what-you-use pricing as the default cost model.
Why it matters
Almost every production system — including the ML/AI pipelines covered elsewhere in this guide — runs on one of these three providers. Knowing the primitives, not just one vendor's specific product names, is what lets you reason about a design regardless of which cloud a company has standardized on.
Interview relevance
Expect questions on choosing compute options for a given workload (steady-state vs. spiky vs. event-driven), how IAM least-privilege prevents lateral movement after a breach, and how managed services trade control for reduced operational burden.