I guess you are cutting straight to the chase and overlooking the fundamentals. I took a lot from the Well-Architected framework from AWS and applied in all my

I guess you are cutting straight to the chase and overlooking the fundamentals. I took a lot from the Well-Architected framework from AWS and applied in all my projects. https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected/?wa-lens-whitepapers.sort-by=item.additionalFields.sortDate&wa-lens-whitepapers.sort-order=desc https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected/?wa-len... Take a look at the security pillar with extra care. For the cloud I would suggest you take a basic practitioner exam, or at least a preparation course in a platform like whizlabs. There you would get a basic understanding of how networking is laid on the cloud. For private, on-premises projects, it really comes down to what you have at hand. In this case maybe the Google SRE book would be good. You take good practices in maintaining a data center and apply the distilled knowledge to what makes sense to your infrastructure: https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/toc/index.html https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/toc/index.html Read this book as in topics, not sequentially, coming back to the fundamentals when you feel lost, otherwise you might end up lost in technicalities that make little sense to your work. Also take a look at the shared responsibility principle. There it is exposed what are the client and cloud provider responsibility. When you have a private on-premises project all you have to do is implement the entire responsibility stack that the cloud does for you.