Assessment 1 taught me how to reason about cloud architecture. Assessment 3 forced me to put one on the wire - and prove it works. The Jump From Diagrams to Reality A couple of weeks ago I wrote my Cloud Computing Fundamentals (CCF501) Assessment 1, a 1,500-word architecture proposal for a fictional startup, full of NIST characteristics and Mermaid diagrams (read: CCF501 Assessment 1 write-up ). Assessment 3 was different. The brief gave me four tasks: resource group, virtual network, firewall, application - and asked me to actually do them on a real cloud, with real screenshots, on a public IP. No more reasoning about Auto Scaling: provision the VM, open the port and make the application return a 200. This article is the deployment story documenting what I built, why I picked an open-source tool nobody else in my cohort was deploying, and the security and governance choices I had to defend with evidence instead of paragraphs.…