Most outages and breaches start below the application — plan addressing, front traffic properly, and prove a private service stays private.
The instance is running and the app answers locally, yet nothing reaches it from outside — or, worse, everything does. Cloud networking is where most outages and most breaches actually begin, and the console hides the reasoning behind a wall of dropdowns. This course rebuilds that reasoning. You plan Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) ranges that will still fit three teams from now, lay out multi-tier Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and DigitalOcean, and put load balancers, health checks, and weighted routing in front of them. Then you close the doors: security groups versus network access control lists, web application firewalls, distributed denial-of-service tiers, and egress filtering that stops data walking out. You join clouds privately over VPN, Transit Gateway, and PrivateLink, automate the certificate lifecycle with ACME and mutual TLS, expose APIs through gateways with rate limits and token validation, and read flow logs to answer what a packet capture would have told you. The final module is zero trust: identity at the edge, policy as code, and a red-team check that your private subnet really is private.
Built by Lakshya Kumar
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Carve subnets, steer route tables, keep private workloads off the internet, and read flow logs when traffic goes somewhere it should not.
Choose the right balancer on each cloud, fail bad targets out quickly, and shift a release between versions without dropping a request.
Write allow-rules you can defend in a review, absorb a volumetric flood, and block the outbound path attackers use to move data out.
Stand up site-to-site and client tunnels, see what BGP is actually advertising, and reach a managed service over a private endpoint.
Use routing policies and health checks to move users to a healthy region, and keep internal names resolving without hardcoded addresses.
Issue, renew, and rotate certificates on a schedule, run mutual TLS between services, and understand the chain a browser is validating.
Put auth, rate limits, validation, and versioning at the edge so every service behind it stops reimplementing the same four concerns.
Query flow logs, run reachability analysis, and baseline latency so the next connectivity incident ends in minutes instead of guesswork.
Replace perimeter thinking with identity-aware proxies, policy as code, and mesh mutual TLS — then attack it to prove isolation holds.
Complete all modules, then submit the required number of capstone projects. Each must earn a passing rating from an admin reviewer.
Design and deploy a zero-trust network across two clouds (AWS + GCP). Use mutual TLS for service-to-service traffic, private endpoints for all data services (no public IPs), policy-enforced egress to the internet, and an identity-aware proxy as the only ingress for admin access. Document the threat model, the policy decisions, and prove isolation with a red-team exercise (e.g., attempt SSH to a private instance from outside the VPC and demonstrate the failure).
I'm considering 'Cloud Networking & Security' — a course on the full networking stack across AWS, Azure, GCP, and DigitalOcean. Covers: networking fundamentals refresher (OSI/CIDR/TCP/DNS/TLS), VPC design, load balancing, firewalls and DDoS, VPNs and private connectivity, DNS and service discovery, TLS certificate management, API gateways, network observability, and zero-trust security. 10 modules × 10 tasks each. Context: 1. My current role: [e.g. "backend dev", "junior SRE", "platform engineer", "security engineer"] 2. Cloud experience: [e.g. "AWS only", "AWS+GCP", "single-cloud, multi-cloud is new", "multi-cloud at scale"] 3. My goal: [e.g. "design a multi-cloud network for a startup", "pass the AWS Advanced Networking specialty", "implement zero-trust at my company", "harden an existing VPC after a security audit"]
Simulate a multi-VPC outage caused by overlapping CIDR ranges or a misconfigured route table. Document the diagnosis flow, the rollback procedure, and the preventive policy (Terraform constraint, organization-level guardrail) that would have stopped it. Test the runbook against a real (test) account.
Design and deploy a PrivateLink-based architecture exposing a managed service to a consumer VPC across accounts without ever traversing the public internet. Include DNS routing, IAM trust policies, the endpoint service config, and a load test verifying private-only egress.
Implement a Transit Gateway connecting 8+ VPCs across 2 regions with route-table-based isolation between dev/staging/prod. Include propagation rules, BGP advertisement testing with a simulated on-prem connection, and a cost analysis comparing TGW vs full-mesh peering.
Audit network egress costs for a real (or representative) cloud workload over 30 days. Identify the top three egress hotspots, implement at least two optimizations (CDN, VPC endpoints, region co-location), measure the cost delta, and write a one-page memo for engineering leadership.
Microsoft's networking hub — VNets, NSGs, Front Door, ExpressRoute.