Cloud Architecture Guide
DAY_03 / SECTION_01 // SCALE
MODULE READY

The production environment

How the abstractions stack — vendor-agnostic. The patterns Google's Borg pioneered showed up everywhere: Kubernetes, ECS, GKE, AKS. Knowing the lineage helps you read any modern cloud system.

// the physical hierarchy

From the bottom up — same in any cloud, just different names at the top of the stack.

  • MACHINEa physical box (or a VM)
  • SERVERa piece of software implementing a service
  • RACKtens of machines stand together
  • ROWmultiple racks side by side
  • CLUSTERone or more rows form a cluster
  • DCa datacenter building houses multiple clusters
  • CAMPUSmultiple datacenter buildings located close together

// at the cloud-provider level: availability zone ≈ datacenter · region ≈ campus. multi-region means multiple campuses.

Google datacenter campus topology
// Google datacenter campus — SRE Book Figure 2-1
STACK_01
ONLINE
memory

Hardware

Physical layer
Machines + servers, racks, clusters, datacenters. Cloud providers expose this as AZ → Region.
STACK_02
ONLINE
account_tree

Cluster OS

Borg / K8s
A control plane that schedules workloads. An agent on each machine that executes them. A consensus store keeping the desired state.
STACK_03
STANDBY
cloud

Modern equivalents

Same shape, you'll touch these
Kubernetes · AWS ECS/EKS/Fargate · Azure AKS / Container Apps · GCP GKE / Cloud Run.
// anatomy of a control plane
Borg cluster architecture
// Borg high-level architecture — SRE Book Figure 2-2

A scheduler decides where work runs. A master keeps the state of truth (replicated). Agents on each node execute the work. The persistent store uses a consensus algorithm — Paxos at Google, Raft (etcd) in Kubernetes.

// K8s parallel: kube-scheduler / kube-apiserver / kubelet / etcd. same components, different names.

help Knowledge Check
Question 1/1

Your team is comparing self-hosted Kubernetes vs managed EKS. A teammate says 'EKS is just a wrapper around the same K8s, the architecture is identical.' What's the most accurate response?

// pick one to verify

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