Cloud Providers & Platforms: What's New Here

Build the mental model

You already finished Cloud & Deployment, so you understand deployment pipelines, environment variables, CI/CD automation, serverless functions, containers, monitoring, and basic security practices.

Those are the mechanics of shipping software. This course starts from a different question: once you know how to deploy something, which company or platform should actually host it, and why does that choice matter?

Cloud Providers & Platforms is a landscape course. It maps out the three major clouds — AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure — alongside modern web platforms like Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify, Railway, and Render, and backend-as-a-service tools like Supabase and Firebase that hand you a ready-made backend instead of raw infrastructure.

What category each platform belongs to
What regions and availability zones actually mean
How cloud billing is structured
How to fairly compare providers when a real decision is in front of you

Welcome back

If you've completed Cloud & Deployment, this course is the natural next step. It won't repeat the mechanics — it builds a decision framework on top of them.

If you want deep, hands-on practice with a specific provider or tool, this platform already has full courses: AWS Fundamentals covers EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, IAM, and VPC; Docker covers containers end to end; CI/CD with GitHub Actions covers pipeline authoring; and the Firebase Tutorial covers that backend-as-a-service platform thoroughly. This course won't repeat any of that.

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CLOUD PROVIDER & PLATFORM LANDSCAPE
-----------------------------------
CLOUD PROVIDER & PLATFORM LANDSCAPE
------------------------------------

MAJOR CLOUDS
  - AWS
  - Google Cloud
  - Azure

MODERN WEB PLATFORMS
  - Cloudflare
  - Vercel
  - Netlify
  - Railway
  - Render

BACKEND-AS-A-SERVICE (BaaS)
  - Supabase
  - Firebase

This course teaches how to choose between these categories,
not how to operate any single product listed above.

Connect it to a real scenario

This lesson is mostly orientation, so there isn't a hands-on task in the traditional sense. Treat the code example below as a quick self-check.

It's a small, real function that looks at which prior courses you've completed and tells you which parts of this landscape are still genuinely new territory for you.

Try it yourself

Even completing every prior course, the chapters still come back as new — operating a tool and choosing between tools are different skills.

As you move through the next five lessons, keep asking: 'If I had a real project today, how would this help me decide where to put it?'

This course does not re-teach Cloud & Deployment concepts
It maps the provider/platform landscape and teaches a choice framework
AWS Fundamentals, Docker, CI/CD, and Firebase Tutorial already own hands-on depth

Try the working example

javascript

function whatsNewForYou(completed) {
  const allChapters = [
    "Provider & Platform Landscape Map",
    "IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS",
    "Regions & Availability Zones",
    "Cloud Cost Structure",
    "AWS vs Google Cloud vs Azure Comparison"
  ];

  const alreadyFamiliarTerms = [];
  if (completed.completedCloudDeployment) {
    alreadyFamiliarTerms.push("environment variables", "CI/CD", "serverless basics");
  }
  if (completed.completedAwsFundamentals) {
    alreadyFamiliarTerms.push("EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, IAM specifics");
  }
  if (completed.completedDocker) {
    alreadyFamiliarTerms.push("containers");
  }
  if (completed.completedFirebase) {
    alreadyFamiliarTerms.push("Firebase-specific BaaS workflow");
  }

  return {
    newChapters: allChapters,
    alreadyFamiliarTerms,
    note: alreadyFamiliarTerms.length
      ? "Some terms will feel familiar, but this course teaches how they fit together, not how to operate them."
      : "Everything here will be new vocabulary and mental models for you."
  };
}

const learner = {
  completedCloudDeployment: true,
  completedAwsFundamentals: true,
  completedDocker: false,
  completedFirebase: true
};

console.log(JSON.stringify(whatsNewForYou(learner), null, 2));

You should see

{
  "newChapters": [
    "Provider & Platform Landscape Map",
    "IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS",
    "Regions & Availability Zones",
    "Cloud Cost Structure",
    "AWS vs Google Cloud vs Azure Comparison"
  ],
  "alreadyFamiliarTerms": [
    "environment variables",
    "CI/CD",
    "serverless basics",
    "EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, IAM specifics",
    "Firebase-specific BaaS workflow"
  ],
  "note": "Some terms will feel familiar, but this course teaches how they fit together, not how to operate them."
}

All five chapters come back as new even though the learner completed nearly everything — landscape framing differs from tool operation.

5-minute try-it

Run the function with your own real completion status. Then flip `completedFirebase` to `false` and see how the output changes.

One important caution

Mistaking this course as a substitute for AWS Fundamentals — the depth is not the same

Assuming landscape mental models replace the need for hands-on skills

NIST Definition of Cloud Computing — Cloud Providers & Platforms