Old School vs. Cloud School: Infrastructure Makeover
From Switchports to Security Groups — It’s All Still Just Networking.
Remember when “networking” meant tracing cables with a flashlight, a prayer, and a label maker from 2009?
Now it’s just drop-down menus and YAML files that somehow cost $2,000 a month.
Cloud networking isn’t new — it’s just old networking with a shiny GUI and a per-hour billing model.
Let’s decode what actually changed (and what didn’t).
🧱 Old School: Subnets, VLANs, and Firewalls
You used to:
Carve up your /24s and argue with the firewall guy about overlapping IPs.
Label trunk ports like “DO NOT TOUCH” (which someone always did).
Spend an entire afternoon getting VLAN 30 to talk to VLAN 40.
☁️ Cloud School: VPCs, Security Groups, and NACLs
Now you:
Create “VPCs” (aka fancy broadcast domains).
Build “subnets” that still need CIDRs (math never left).
Use Security Groups and Network ACLs that pretend to be firewalls but secretly hate you.
It’s all the same game — just rebranded.
The real difference? AWS charges you to play it.
🔐 Permissions Are the New Outages
Back in the day, “access denied” meant you mistyped a password.
Now it means your IAM policy is missing a JSON stanza that looks like it was written by Cthulhu.
IAM is the new ACL.
And just like ACLs, nobody understands them until something breaks.
💸 The Hidden Lesson
You didn’t escape networking.
You just moved it into a console that bills you by the minute.
Cloud School teaches you that the fundamentals never died — they just got a new logo and a line item on your invoice.
🚀 Want to Go Deeper?
In the paid version, we break down:
A full “Cloud Rosetta Stone” table mapping on-prem terms to AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Real design examples showing how your old network diagram translates to cloud.
IAM survival tips (and how to avoid locking yourself out at 2 a.m.).
If you’ve ever yelled “Why can’t this subnet talk to that instance?” — the extended version is your therapy session.
👉 Upgrade to the Extended Edition and get the full breakdown: theconfigreport.com
Next Up: Issue 4 – Storage Wars: Cloud Edition
Because “Blob” and “Bucket” are just marketing’s way of saying “We renamed your SAN.”
— JJ – Chief Packet Pusher.