Module Objective: Identify the goals and structure of this course, describe the café business case used throughout it, and explain what a cloud architect does.

Prerequisite: Knowledge of AWS Cloud topics equivalent to completing AWS Academy Cloud Foundations (CLD110) or comparable experience.

Course Overview and Objectives

AWS Academy Cloud Architecting teaches how to design IT infrastructure on AWS, moving beyond individual services (the focus of Cloud Foundations) toward how those services combine into complete, well-architected solutions.

Because architectural solutions differ by industry, application type, and business size, the course emphasizes AWS best practices and design patterns rather than a single prescriptive template — the goal is learning how to think through architecture decisions, not memorizing one fixed design.

🔵 Why It Matters This course is explicitly built as a bridge to the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) exam, which tests exactly this kind of applied, scenario-based architectural judgment.

The Café Business Case

Throughout the course, a recurring fictional business — a café chain modernizing its IT — is used to ground abstract services in a concrete, evolving scenario: starting with a simple website and growing into a scalable, secure, highly available architecture.

Each module adds a new architectural layer to the café's environment, so earlier decisions (storage, compute, networking) are revisited and refined as new requirements and constraints are introduced.

✅ Tip — Treat the Case Study as a Thread Following how the café's architecture evolves module to module is often more useful for retention than treating each module's services in isolation — it mirrors how a real architecture actually grows.

The Role of a Cloud Architect

A cloud architect translates business and technical requirements into a working, cost-effective, secure, and resilient design — balancing trade-offs across the Well-Architected Framework's six pillars (introduced in Module 2) rather than optimizing for just one.

This role sits alongside — but is distinct from — cloud developers, cloud operations engineers, and security engineers, each of which AWS Academy offers a separate, complementary course for.

🔵 Note Cloud architecture is inherently a role of trade-offs: a design decision that improves performance may raise cost, and a decision that improves security may add operational complexity. Naming the trade-off explicitly is part of the job.

Relationship to AWS Academy Cloud Foundations

This course assumes familiarity with the fundamentals covered in AWS Academy Cloud Foundations (CLD110) — cloud concepts, core services, security basics, networking, compute, storage, and databases.

Modules 2 and 3 of this course intentionally revisit some of that foundational material at a review level before the course moves into new, deeper architectural territory starting in Module 4.

⚠️ Warning — This Course Moves Faster on Fundamentals If Regions, Availability Zones, IAM, EC2, S3, or VPC basics feel unfamiliar, revisiting the corresponding CLD110 module before continuing will make Modules 2–8 much easier to follow.

Course Roadmap

The 15 modules build in three broad phases: a review of foundational concepts, a layer-by-layer build-out of an architecture, and finally a set of cross-cutting design principles that apply across every layer.

PhaseModulesFocus
Foundations review1–2Course orientation and a review of cloud architecting concepts
Building the layers3–8Storage, compute, database, networking, and security layers, one at a time
Cross-cutting design9–14Elasticity, automation, caching, decoupling, serverless, and disaster recovery — principles that apply across every layer
Exam readiness15Bridging course content to the SAA-C03 certification exam
✅ Tip — Layers Build on Each Other Modules 3–8 aren't independent topics — the compute layer in Module 4 depends on the storage layer from Module 3, and the networking layer in Modules 6–7 is what everything else runs inside of.

Key Terms for Module 1

cloud architect
The role responsible for translating requirements into a working, well-architected cloud design
café business case
The recurring fictional scenario used throughout the course to ground architectural concepts
architectural layer
A distinct concern — such as storage, compute, database, or networking — built up incrementally across Modules 3–8

Review Questions

  1. What is the difference in focus between AWS Academy Cloud Foundations and AWS Academy Cloud Architecting?
  2. Why does this course use a recurring business case instead of a new example in every module?
  3. What trade-offs might a cloud architect have to balance when making a single design decision?
  4. How are the 15 modules of this course organized into broader phases?