What you'll learn

Cloud workloads can fail in ways that are difficult to see from a standard architecture diagram. A single weak dependency, shared service, control plane assumption, gray failure, or regional impairment can turn a routine component problem into a customer-impacting incident. In this course, Understanding Cloud Failure Patterns, you’ll gain the ability to analyze cloud workload designs and identify the failure patterns that influence resilience and recovery decisions. First, you’ll explore how to map workload components across compute, storage, network, identity, data, application, and external dependency layers. Next, you’ll discover how to identify failure domains, blast radius, single points of failure, correlated failure, cascading failure, dependency failure, gray failure, regional outage risk, and control plane impairment. Finally, you’ll learn how to prioritize failure risks using business impact, service criticality, recovery effort, data loss tolerance, assumptions, unknowns, and untested risks. When you’re finished with this course, you’ll have the skills and knowledge of cloud failure-pattern analysis needed to evaluate workload designs before selecting resilience, high availability, or disaster recovery strategies.