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Cloud Computing

2 min readArticle

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing resources (servers, storage, databases, networking, software) over the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis. The "cloud" is just someone else's data center — but with massive scale, automation APIs, and global distribution.

The Big Three

Provider CLI Notes
aws-amazon-web-services-guide aws Market leader (~33%), most services
microsoft-azure-guide az Enterprise-dominant (AD integration)
google-cloud-platform-guide gcloud Strong in ML/data, Kubernetes

Service Models

Model What You Manage Examples
IaaS (Infra as a Service) OS, runtime, apps, data EC2, Azure VM, GCE
PaaS (Platform as a Service) Just your apps and data Heroku, App Engine
SaaS (Software as a Service) Nothing Gmail, Office 365, Salesforce
FaaS (Function as a Service) Just your code Lambda, Azure Functions

Deployment Models

  • Public cloud — Resources shared across many customers (AWS, Azure, GCP)
  • Private cloud — Cloud infra dedicated to one org (on-prem or hosted)
  • Hybrid cloud — Mix of on-prem and public cloud
  • Multi-cloud — Using multiple public cloud providers

Core Concepts (Universal)

  • Region — Geographic area with multiple data centers
  • Availability Zone — Isolated data center within a region
  • VPC/VNet — Your virtual private network in the cloud
  • IAM — Who can do what (users, roles, policies)
  • Object Storage — S3/Blob/GCS for files and data
  • Compute — Virtual machines you run your workloads on
  • Serverless — Run code without managing servers

Cloud Security Fundamentals

The Shared Responsibility Model:

  • Provider is responsible for security of the cloud (hardware, hypervisor, physical)
  • Customer is responsible for security in the cloud (OS hardening, IAM config, data)

Common Cloud Attack Paths:

  1. Exposed credentials (AWS keys in GitHub, leaked .env files)
  2. Public storage buckets/blobs with sensitive data
  3. SSRF (Server-Side Request Forgery) → cloud metadata endpoint → credentials
  4. Overpermissioned IAM roles
  5. Misconfigured security groups/NSGs (0.0.0.0/0 everywhere)

Metadata Endpoints (Post-Exploitation)

When you have code execution on a cloud VM, hit the metadata service:

bash 
# AWS
curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/
curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/iam/security-credentials/

# Azure
curl -H "Metadata:true" "http://169.254.169.254/metadata/instance?api-version=2021-02-01"

# GCP
curl -H "Metadata-Flavor: Google" http://metadata.google.internal/computeMetadata/v1/

Useful Tools

  • ScoutSuite — Multi-cloud security auditing tool
  • Prowler — AWS security assessment
  • CloudMapper — AWS visualization and recon
  • Pacu — AWS exploitation framework
  • ROADtools — Azure AD enumeration and exploitation

Sub-pages

  • aws-amazon-web-services-guide - Amazon Web Services
  • microsoft-azure-guide - Microsoft Azure
  • google-cloud-platform-guide - Google Cloud Platform
  • programming/index - Programming languages used in cloud
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