Last Updated on November 16, 2025

Objective: Build a rock-solid understanding of cloud computing across AWS, Azure, and GCP, while choosing one cloud as the primary specialization.
For GovTech, AWS is highly recommended due to mature compliance, security frameworks, and government-ready services.

🔹 What You Will Learn in Phase 1

1️⃣ Cloud Fundamentals

  • What are Regions & Availability Zones
  • Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM)
  • Pricing, Billing, SLAs, Cost Calculators
  • Shared Responsibility Model (GovCloud perspective)

2️⃣ Compute Services

  • AWS EC2, Auto Scaling, Load Balancing
  • AWS Lambda (serverless intro)
  • Azure Virtual Machines
  • GCP Compute Engine

3️⃣ Cloud Storage Essentials

  • AWS S3 + Storage Classes
  • Azure Blob Storage
  • GCP Cloud Storage
  • Lifecycle Policies, Replication, Encryption

4️⃣ Networking Basics

  • VPC, Subnets, Route Tables
  • Internet/NAT Gateways
  • Security Groups vs NACLs
  • DNS (Route53, Azure DNS, Cloud DNS)
  • Application Load Balancer & Network Load Balancer

5️⃣ Monitoring & Observability

  • Amazon CloudWatch
  • Azure Monitor
  • GCP Cloud Monitoring
  • Basic alerting & metrics dashboards

6️⃣ Cloud Service Models Explained

  • IaaS — Servers, VMs, storage
  • PaaS — RDS, Elastic Beanstalk, App Engine
  • SaaS — Ready-made apps like Gmail, O365
  • When to choose what (GovTech + Enterprise angle)

🧪 Hands-on Labs (Beginner Friendly)

These labs make you “job-ready” early:

✔ Deploy Spring Boot App on AWS EC2

  • EC2 creation
  • SSH & security groups
  • JAR deployment with systemd
  • Reverse proxy with Nginx
  • Basic hardening steps for government workloads

✔ Connect Spring Boot App to AWS RDS (PostgreSQL)

  • RDS creation, parameter groups
  • Subnet groups, multi-AZ basics
  • Secure connectivity via VPC
  • Connecting from application.yml

✔ Use AWS S3 for File Storage

Example use case:
RIMS (Railway Inspection Management System) document storage —
Upload → Pre-signed URL → View → Archive

Includes:

  • Buckets
  • Folder structure
  • IAM roles/policies
  • Multi-Region backups
  • Server-side encryption (SSE-S3, SSE-KMS)

🎯 Target Certification (Optional but Useful)

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Great for refreshing fundamentals before moving to solution architect or DevOps certifications.

💡 Outcome After Phase 1

By the end of this phase, you will be able to:

  • Understand how cloud works end-to-end
  • Deploy real apps on cloud
  • Configure S3, EC2, RDS, VPC, IAM
  • Move confidently to Cloud Architecture & DevOps Series (Phase 2)
  • Begin thinking like a Cloud-Native Java Architect