Hi Inner Circle! 👋

Welcome to this week's edition.

This week, I'm sharing something I've been putting together for a while ~ a curated list of 50 Cloud & DevOps concepts every engineer should know, complete with hand-picked learning resources for each one.

Whether you're just starting out or leveling up, bookmark this one. It's a cheat sheet you'll come back to again and again. Let's dive in! ☁️

50 Cloud & DevOps Concepts ~ Your Full Learning Guide

Storage & Content Delivery

1. NAS vs SAN — Network Attached Storage vs Storage Area Network

2. RAID levels (0,1,5,6,10) — What is RAID 0, 1, 5, & 10?

3. Data deduplication — Deduplication for Dummies - What is deduplication?

4. Hierarchical / tiered storage — Chapter 8 | Hierarchical Storage Management

5. Content Delivery Networks (CDN) 

   1. What Is A CDN? How Does It Work? 

   2. ByteByteGo | How Does CDN Work?

6. Cache invalidation & TTL 

   1. Caching Pitfalls Every Developer Should Know 

   2. A Crash Course in Caching - Part 1 - by Alex Xu

7. Disk performance metrics (IOPS, latency, throughput) —

   1. IOPS, Throughput & Latency Explained

   2. Disk metrics - Azure Virtual Machines | Microsoft Learn

8. Storage benchmarking tools (fio, iostat, iozone) — Storage Performance Benchmarking Playlist

Networking

9. CIDR & subnetting — IP Subnetting, Variable Subnetting, and CIDR (Supernetting) - Cisco Community

10. Layer 2 vs Layer 3 networking — Layer 2 vs Layer 3 Switches

11. DNS resolution process — DNS Resolution, Step by Step

12. NAT and PAT — NAT vs PAT, Static vs Dynamic -- demystified! -- Network Address Translation

13. IPv4 vs IPv6 — IPv4 vs. IPv6: Differences

14. Load balancing (Layer 4 vs Layer 7) — A Crash Course on Load Balancers for Scaling

15. Load balancing algorithms (round robin, session affinity) — Top 6 Load Balancing Algorithms

16. Network troubleshooting tools (ping, traceroute, tcpdump) — PING and TRACERT (traceroute) networking commands

Compute (Linux / Containers / Serverless)

17. Virtual Machines & hypervisors —

    1. Virtualization Explained 

    2. What is a Hypervisor?

18. Containerization (Docker) —

    1. Week 4: Containerization, Kubernetes in the AI Era

    2. Containerization Explained 

    3. Docker Crash Course for Absolute Beginners [NEW]

19. Container orchestration (Kubernetes / ECS) —

    1. Week 4: Containerization, Kubernetes in the AI Era

    2. Container Orchestration Explained

20. Microservices architecture —

    1. Microservices on AWS

    2. What Is Microservices Architecture? | Google Cloud

    3. What Are Microservices Really All About?

    4. A Crash Course on Microservices Design Patterns 

    5. 9 Best Practices for Building Microservices

21. Serverless computing — Serverless Simplified

22. Memory management (paging vs swapping) — Paging and swapping

23. Linux kernel architecture — Introduction — The Linux Kernel documentation

24. CPU & memory troubleshooting in production —

    1. Troubleshooting Linux Problems: A Beginner's Guide - Red Hat Learning Community

    2. Linux Troubleshooting: These 4 Steps Will Fix 99% of Errors

Databases

Complete Cheatsheet : Database Comparison Cheatsheet: Interactive Guide to SQL, NoSQL, Modern DBs -Tradeoffs & Use Cases

25. Relational vs NoSQL databases 

    1. SQL vs. NoSQL Databases: What's the Difference? | IBM

    2. SQL vs NoSQL: Choosing the Right Database for An Application

26. ACID vs BASE 

    1. What's the Difference Between an ACID and a BASE Database? ACID vs BASE - by Nikki Siapno 

    2. ACID Properties in Databases With Examples

27. CAP theorem — CAP Theorem Explained - by Ashish Pratap Singh

28. Database indexing —

    1. An in-depth look at Database Indexing 

    2. 7 Must-know Strategies to Scale Your Database

29. Table scans - Why to avoid it!

30. OLTP vs OLAP systems — OLAP vs. OLTP: What's the Difference? | IBM

31. Database sharding & partitioning — 7 Must-know Strategies to Scale Your Database

32. Query optimization & execution plans — Types & Concepts

Administration & Security

33. Identity federation & SSO — Single Sign-on vs. Federated Identity Management: The Complete Guide

34. HTTPS / SSL / TLS encryption — HTTPS, SSL Handshake, and Data Encryption Explained / SSL, TLS, HTTPS Explained

35. SSL termination (LB vs instance) — What is SSL Termination? Definition & Related FAQs | VMware

36. Authentication / Authorization / Accounting (AAA) — AAA framework: TACACS+ vs RADIUS

37. DDoS mitigation strategies — DDoS eBook | Cloudflare

38. IDS / IPS systems — IPS. vs. IDS vs. Firewall: What Are the Differences? - Palo Alto Networks

39. Security in multi-tier architecture (SQL injection, XSS) —

    1. How to prevent SQL Injection attacks: prepared statements, ORMs, or something else? | Alex Xu /

    2. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Attacks | Alex Xu

Analytics / AI / ML

40. MapReduce architecture — Map Reduce explained with example | System Design

41. Streaming data pipelines (Kafka / Kinesis) — Building Data Pipelines with Apache Kafka® and Confluent | Data Pipelines Tutorials

42. Feature engineering for ML models — Step By Step Process In EDA And Feature Engineering In Data Science Projects

43. Supervised vs Unsupervised learning — All Machine Learning algorithms explained in 17 min

44. Recommendation systems & personalization — What is a Recommendation System? | Data Science | NVIDIA Glossary

Deployment & Management (DevOps / AIOps)

45. Continuous Integration (CI) — CI/CD Explained

46. CI/CD pipelines — Week 5 + 6: CI/CD + Security in Action

47. Deployment strategies (Blue-Green, Canary) — Kubernetes Deployment Strategies Explained

48. Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation) — Week 3 — Infrastructure as Code & Containerization

49. Observability (metrics, logs, tracing) — Week 7: Observability & AIOps

50. AI-driven operations (AIOps, anomaly detection) — AIOps in Practice

That's all for this week! Save this, share it with someone leveling up in tech, and let me know which concept you're tackling first. 💛

-V

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