Cloud Engineering: 3.1 Introduction: What Cloud Engineering Actually Is 24 3.2 The Shared Responsibility Model 25 3.2.1 How Responsibility Shifts by Service Model 25 3.2.2 The Backup Trap 26 3.2.3 Concentration and Correlated Risk 26 3.3 Service Models 27 3.3.1 The Compute

Learning Objectives

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

1. Define cloud engineering as a discipline and distinguish it from infrastructure administration, DevOps, and cloud architecture.
2. Apply the shared responsibility model to determine which obligations transfer to a provider under each service model and which never do.
3. Select appropriate service and deployment models for a given workload, justifying the choice against security, latency, cost, regulatory, and operational-maturity constraints.
4. Design a landing zone: the account structure, identity model, network topology, logging, and policy baseline that a workload lands into.
5. Evaluate reliability in cloud environments using failure domains, blast radius, and recovery objectives rather than provider availability claims.
6. Construct a migration plan using a disposition framework and explain why the cheapest migration path is frequently the most expensive outcome.
7. Operate a FinOps practice that ties cloud spend to business value rather than merely reducing invoices.
8. Assess where AI and agentic automation can safely hold authority in cloud operations, and where human accountability must remain.
9. Recognize the common anti-patterns of enterprise cloud programmes and identify their early warning signs.