B4LCILC — Free Interactive Cloud Courses (AWS + Azure)

Learn by doing

These are not documents to read. You practice real commands in a browser terminal, answer questions that explain themselves, drill vocabulary on flashcards, and work through the decisions real cloud teams face — with your progress saved as you go.

Simulated labsType real AWS and Azure CLI commands and see real output. Nothing is created, so nothing can ever cost you money.

Every concept, both cloudsAWS and Azure side by side. Learn the idea once, know it twice — the pairing named in 15% of all tech job postings.

Questions that teach288 quiz questions, each explaining why the right answer is right and why the tempting one seduces you.

Built for anywhereGDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, SOC 2, ISO 27001 — global compliance and global salary context, not one country's market.

The three courses

◆ The Cloud Leader Course

14 modules · 144 quiz questions · 14 decision scenarios · 247 flashcards

Lead a team of cloud engineers without being one. Meeting fluency, architecture judgment, security, FinOps, hiring.

Start the interactive course →

Or read the offline edition — 9 languages

🇬🇧 English PDF 🇹🇭 ไทย PDF 🇲🇲 မြန်မာ PDF 🇱🇦 ລາວ PDF 🇲🇾 Bahasa Melayu PDF 🇻🇳 Tiếng Việt PDF 🇫🇷 Français PDF 🇸🇦 العربية PDF 🇪🇸 Español PDF

▲ The Cloud Engineer Course

14 modules · 14 hands-on labs · 143 quiz questions · 228 flashcards

Become a hired cloud engineer. Linux, networking, IAM, Terraform, containers, CI/CD, monitoring — with 14 simulated labs.

Start the interactive course →

Or read the offline edition — 9 languages

● The Cloud Architect Course

14 modules · 8 design exercises · 142 quiz questions · 213 flashcards

Design systems others build. Well-Architected pillars, pattern catalog, migration, compliance, multi-region.

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Or read the offline edition — 9 languages

Finish with something you can show

The B4LCILC Capstone

Build one real system · AWS or Azure · 2–6 weeks

A certificate says you studied. A working system with a public web address says you can do the job. This capstone gives you objectives, not instructions — you build a real site on real cloud infrastructure, with a database, an API, locked-down permissions, automated tests, infrastructure as code and a deployment pipeline. Being stuck and working it out is the point, because that is what the job actually is. You finish with three links for your CV.

Take on the capstone →

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Want to practice on real AWS and Azure?

Free Real Cloud Practice — The 2026 Guide

Verified 13 August 2026 · updated for this year's changes

You can get real, hands-on AWS and Azure console time with no credit card and no academic email, from anywhere in the world — but almost every guide online is now out of date. AWS ended its 12-month free tier, Microsoft discontinued its free sandbox, and Play with Docker shut down. This guide covers what actually works today, including AWS's new free sandbox accounts, and the exact order to open things in so you never start a countdown clock before you can use it.

Read the guide →

Also available as

PDF download

Which course is for me? Want to manage a cloud team without becoming an engineer → Leader. Want to get hired building and running cloud systems → Engineer. Want to design the systems others build → Architect. Many people do Engineer, then Architect.

Will this cost me anything? No. Every lab runs in the browser simulator, so you can finish all three courses without a cloud account or a credit card. If you later want real practice, the courses show you how — including the free no-card routes (AWS Educate and Azure for Students) and the exact spend alarms to set first.

Free to learn, free to share. More languages and more courses are on the way.