1. Determine if cloud solution is appropriate
1.1 Explain advantages provided by cloud to stakeholders
• Describe cloud infrastructure
• Distinguish between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS
• Show how cloud allows building applications cheaper than with traditional models
• Show how cloud allows building applications faster than with traditional models
1.2 Explain cost to stakeholders
• Identify the use case (new development or transition of existing product or service)
• Identify the resources that will be required to construct the service or product using cloud-hosted components (include compute, data, and network costs)
• Identify support plan that will be required to meet performance, availability, scalability, and reliability (PASR) criteria
• Consider factors that go into return on investment
1.3 Explain performance to stakeholders
• Identify performance criteria
• Consider what solutions meet the criteria
• Assess cost and availability of technical expertise
1.4 Explain reliability to stakeholders
• Identify reliability criteria, including network speeds
• Consider what solutions meet the criteria
• Understand service-level agreement (SLA) with cloud provider
• Consider disaster-recovery and backup plans (including backup redundancy or replication factor)
1.5 Explain availability to stakeholders
• Identify the use case (new development or transition of existing product or service)
• Identify any upstream or downstream SLAs that will govern availability requirements
• Establish availability metrics
• Assess the SLA offered by the cloud-hosted solution
1.6 Explain scalability to stakeholders
• Identify the use case (new development or transition of existing product or service)
• Understand that rules can be set to adjust resources based on need
1.7 Recommend off-the-shelf (OTS) or custom solutions as needed
• Identify the use case (new development or transition of existing product or service)
• Evaluate if existing OTS offering meets performance, availability, scalability, and reliability needs
• Evaluate technical effort needed for custom solution
• Evaluate if custom solution can exceed OTS on PASR criteria

2. Developing cloud architecture
2.1 Choose between public, private, and hybrid cloud implementations
• Identify the security and privacy requirements for the solution (focusing on networking options that each provides)
• Consider limits imposed by tenancy in various cloud implementations
2.2 Draw an architectural diagram (show data flows)
• Break down the proposed solution into compute, data, and networking components
• Produce logical groupings for the components
• Mark data flows between components (including the protocol)
• Identify system and component boundaries (including responsibility model)
2.3 Define requirements
• Decide whether to virtualize server, network, storage, and desktop
• Be aware of design patterns like microservices and serverless
• Consider networking infrastructure, storage devices, memory, and end-user devices required
2.4 Identify how services communicate through application programming interfaces (APIs)
• Identifying services with which the application needs to integrate
• Interact using an API
2.5 Create virtual machines
• Determine the operating system for the virtual machines
• Choose the appropriate size for the virtual machines
• Decide on geographic setting for the virtual machines (latency, legal requirements)
• Configure options (e.g., time limitations, scaling, backups) for the virtual machines
2.6 Identify data storage requirements
• Distinguish between structured and unstructured data
• Determine amount of storage needed
• Consider location of storage
• Consider storage security

3. Implementing the cloud development life cycle
3.1 Create content in virtual environments
• Understand that a source-code management system needs to be set up
• Install and configure the prerequisite packages in the virtual environment
• Save changes and keep track of the codes in a source code management system (such as Github)
3.2 Perform testing
• Provide different test cases, test scenarios, and test scripts
• Run the tests and report the bugs iteratively
3.3 Structure the overall cloud-based solution
• Integrate systems and applications within the selected environment
• Integrate systems and applications with legacy systems
• Integrate systems and applications with third-party applications
• Distinguish between containers and virtual machines
• Know when to choose containers over virtual machines
3.4 Deploy application on server
• Decide on the strategy to deploy a new application, replacing a previous one
• Understand version control
• Identify cloud-hosted solutions to create code and data pipelines (e.g., cloud-native CI/CD offerings and workflow automation like GitHub Actions)
• Identify existing CI/CD practices

4. Managing cloud operations
4.1 Manage operational costs
• Understand usage-based pricing
• Scale up and scale down to meet demand cost-effectively
4.2 Develop business continuity and disaster recovery policy
• Identify potential risks and disaster scenarios
• Establish on-premise vs offsite backup strategy
4.3 Provide support to users
• Identify protection and security policies for external and internal users
• Provide application and hardware support for internal users
• Provide training tools for internal and external users
4.4 Monitoring cloud systems
• Log events
• Monitor hardware and software (e.g., interpret graphs and dashboards)
• Understand notifications or alerts for provisioning backup

5. Understanding cloud governance
5.1 Comply with privacy and regulatory requirements
• Identify relevant privacy requirements based on geographical and domain constraints (e.g. BIPA, HIPAA, PDP, FERPA, COPPA, GDPR, CCPA, etc.) as well as organization-specific policies
• Identify cloud-provider compliance for these privacy regulations
• Assess types of data managed within the environment
• Assess location and storage of data
• Be aware of NIST and ISO frameworks and standards
5.2 Comply with ethical guidelines
• Consider the impact of bias, lack of transparency, and lack of accountability
• Explain potential bias and transparency challenges with prebuilt services
5.3 Managing cloud security
• Understand options and concepts for identity verification and authentication, including digital identity and multifactor authentication
• Understand access policies and authorizations (e.g., options for access, vendor-provided roles vs. custom roles and permissions, and access hygiene, including least privilege access, removal of access when not needed, disabling accounts)
• Understand the importance of data security and encryption
• Understand options to protect against unauthorized access in cloud environments (including intrusion detection and prevention, firewalls)