This part settles which cloud actually fits your system.

• Telling public, private, hybrid, multi and on-premise apart
• Provider selection criteria, including vendor lock-in and digital sovereignty
• Managed versus self-managed services and the shared responsibility model
• Compliance frameworks such as GDPR, ISO 27001 and BSI C5

Here you decide how the parts of a distributed application talk to each other.

• Weighing monolith, microservices and self-contained systems against each other
• Decoupled communication through event sourcing, messaging and HTTP feeds
• Integration through the backend or through the frontend
• Eventual consistency and what it does to data integrity

The longest part of the curriculum takes containers apart, from isolation to migration.

• The goals and benefits of the cloud native concept
• Namespaces, cgroups, capabilities and the risks of privileged containers
• Container manager abstractions: health checks, scaling, placement, overlay networks
• Object and block storage, backup and restore, cloud migration patterns

This part supplies the patterns for cutting modules into containers and keeping them standing.

• Container application design: ambassador, adapter, sidecar, scatter and gather, work queue
• Choosing between functions as a service and container orchestration
• Fault tolerance at the communication layer and service mesh concepts
• Chaos engineering as a deliberate test of system resilience

This part is about the road from commit to cloud production.

• Development and CI/CD environments for cloud projects
• Rolling, canary and blue/green deployment
• Dev, test and prod clusters with responsibilities and access control
• Secrets management, automated secret rotation, the secrets operator

Operations becomes a design job: automated, measurable and on minimal privileges.

• DevOps, DevSecOps and site reliability engineering as roles
• Infrastructure as code across the APIs of different cloud providers
• Least privilege and policy enforcement in hybrid and multi-cloud setups
• Observability architecture, plus sizing clusters and calculating availability

The case study pulls the curriculum together on one continuous example.

• Practical exercises across the full length of the part
• Applying the patterns from parts 1 to 6 to a concrete system
• Not exam relevant, but mandatory in every conformant training under the curriculum