Cloud Engineering
Choose cloud models and regions with latency, data residency, and cost trade-offs
Cloud Engineering teaches builders how to design, deploy, and operate cloud workloads with cost, latency, security, and reliability in mind—especially for African products serving users across regions with uneven connectivity and tight budgets.
This is an Africoders Academy course. Completing it earns a Certificate of Completion for Cloud Engineering. Prepare for Africoders Certified Cloud Engineer — this course is not itself the professional certification, and it does not claim AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or other vendor accreditation.
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What you will learn
- Choose cloud models and regions with latency, data residency, and cost trade-offs
- Design account and IAM structures with least privilege and separation of duties
- Select and size compute for African traffic patterns and failure modes
- Design storage tiers, lifecycle, and access patterns with cost controls
- Build VPC-minded network layouts with safe public and private boundaries
- Operate managed databases with backups, parameters, and connection hygiene
Prerequisites
- Comfort with Linux command basics and web or API product concepts
- Ability to read simple architecture diagrams and configuration snippets
- Willingness to document cost, security, and operational decisions
- No prior cloud certification required
Prerequisites
- Comfort with Linux command basics and web or API product concepts
- Ability to read simple architecture diagrams and configuration snippets
- Willingness to document cost, security, and operational decisions
- No prior cloud certification required
What you will build and prove
- Project: Capstone: Portfolio Cloud Deploy Pack
- Final assessment: Cloud Engineering assessment (pass 70%)
Course journey
How this free course is structured — watch, practise, and progress module by module.
- Cloud Models and Regions
- Accounts and IAM
- Compute for Real Traffic
- Storage Design
- Networking and VPC Basics
- Managed Databases
- Containers Introduction
- Observability
- Cost Control
- Reliability and Backups
- Security Baselines
- Portfolio Deploy Studio
Assessment
- Cloud Engineering assessment · pass mark 70%
Prove
Course completion means finishing required lessons , required assignments , the course project , and the course assessment . That grants a certificate of completion — not a professional certification.
Curriculum
Week 1: Cloud Models and Regions
- IaaS, PaaS, and managed services trade-offs Preview 30min
- Latency, residency, and failover regions 30min
- Egress, free tiers, and hidden cost drivers 30min
Week 2: Accounts and IAM
- Account and environment separation 30min
- Roles, policies, and human access 30min
- Service identities and credential hygiene 30min
Week 3: Compute for Real Traffic
- Instance families and rightsizing 30min
- Autoscaling and failure domains 30min
- Managed compute vs VMs 30min
Week 4: Storage Design
- Block, file, and object storage 30min
- Lifecycle, versioning, and retention 30min
- Access patterns and public exposure 30min
Week 5: Networking and VPC Basics
- Subnets, routes, and gateways 30min
- Security groups and network ACLs 30min
- DNS, TLS, and edge entry 30min
Week 6: Managed Databases
- Choosing managed relational vs alternatives 30min
- Connections, parameters, and migrations 30min
- Backups, PITR, and restore drills 30min
Week 7: Containers Introduction
- Images, layers, and local runs 30min
- Registries and promotion 30min
- When not to adopt Kubernetes yet 30min
Week 8: Observability
- Logs, metrics, and traces 30min
- Alerting without noise 30min
- Audit trails and access reviews 30min
Week 9: Cost Control
- Tagging and showback 30min
- Budgets, anomalies, and rightsizing cadence 30min
- Architecture choices that reduce spend 30min
Week 10: Reliability and Backups
- Failure modes and blast radius 30min
- Backup strategy and immutability 30min
- Game days and restore evidence 30min
Week 11: Security Baselines
- Account hardening checklist 30min
- Network and data exposure review 30min
- Patching and vulnerability intake 30min
Week 12: Portfolio Deploy Studio
- Architecture and decision log 30min
- Deploy evidence and runbooks 30min
- Residual risk and next improvements 30min
Free to enroll — no purchase required.
Instructor: Africoders
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