CL-107 Cloud & Platform

PostgreSQL for Cloud Engineers

The database competence every cloud engineer is assumed to have and often lacks: schema design that survives change, indexes chosen from query evidence, and transactions understood at the isolation level rather than as a slogan. Learners design a PostgreSQL schema, read EXPLAIN ANALYZE output to fix a slow query, size a connection pool from real concurrency, and recover a database to a point in time. Managed differences across RDS, Cloud SQL and Azure Database are covered wherever they change what you are allowed to do.

B3Practitioner

6modules

42skill atoms

2role journeys

Curriculum

What this course covers.

6 modules, 42 named skill atoms. Expand any module to see them.

1Relational Model and Schema Design7 skill atoms

normalisation to third normal formprimary and foreign keys with cascade behavioursurrogate vs natural keyschoosing numeric, text and timestamptz typesNOT NULL, CHECK and UNIQUE constraintsdenormalisation with a stated reasonmigration files under version control

2Indexing That Earns Its Keep7 skill atoms

B-tree anatomy and selectivitycomposite index column ordercovering indexes and index-only scanspartial indexes for hot subsetsGIN and GiST for JSONB and text searchwrite amplification from surplus indexesunused indexes found in pg_stat_user_indexes

3Transactions and Isolation7 skill atoms

ACID guarantees in practiceread committed vs repeatable read vs serializabledirty read, non-repeatable read and phantom anomaliesMVCC snapshots and row versionsSELECT FOR UPDATE and lock orderingdeadlock detection and retry logiclong transactions blocking autovacuum

4Reading Query Plans7 skill atoms

EXPLAIN vs EXPLAIN ANALYZEseq scan vs index scan vs bitmap heap scannested loop, hash and merge join choicesestimated against actual row countsstale statistics and ANALYZEpg_stat_statements ranked by total timerewriting a query the planner cannot rescue

5Connections and Pooling7 skill atoms

cost of a backend process per connectionPgBouncer transaction vs session poolingmax_connections against instance memorypool sized from concurrency not user countidle in transaction as a leak signalserverless functions exhausting a poolstatement, idle and lock timeouts

6Managed Postgres in the Cloud7 skill atoms

RDS, Cloud SQL and Azure Database differencessuperuser restrictions and extension allowlistsautomated backups vs pg_dump logical dumpspoint-in-time recovery to a timestampread replicas and replication lagfailover behaviour and connection string handlingparameter groups and restart-required settings

Where it fits

CL-107 in the role journeys.

This course appears in 2 of our 45 role journeys. Here is what a learner takes immediately before and after it in each.

Cloud Engineer

Foundation stage

CL-106→CL-107→CL-201

Backend Engineer

Foundation stage

DEV-101→CL-107→DEV-102

Roles this course serves

Backend Engineer Cloud Engineer

The capability ladder

This course is authored to band B3.

Every course we run is written to one rung of the CASI ladder, so a plan can be assembled to take a team from where they are to where they need to be.

What do B1–B6 mean?The CASI Capability Ladder — click to expand

Every course targets a band on the CASI Capability Ladder — our six-band proficiency scale, anchored to open standards (O*NET, ESCO, NICE, NIST AI RMF, Bloom's). A band tells you how deep a course goes, and what evidence proves it.

What the learner can doTypical evidence

AwareUnderstands concepts and vocabulary; uses tools with guidance

Knowledge checks

FoundationPerforms standard tasks correctly in familiar contexts

Guided labs, autograded exercises

PractitionerDelivers complete pieces of work independently

Scenario labs, proctored hands-on exams

ProfessionalHandles production-grade complexity, trade-offs and failure modes

Break-fix drills, design defenses

AdvancedEngineers systems end-to-end under constraints; leads others

Rubric-scored capstones, vivas

ExpertSets direction; recognised authority across teams

Portfolio + panel evaluation

A note on B6. Courses in this catalog target B1–B5. B6 is not taught — it is recognised, through a portfolio and a panel, once someone is setting direction for others. Every journey here is built to land a learner at B5.

Other Cloud courses at this level.

CL-205

Run CL-107 for your team.

This course runs at several lengths depending on how deep you need to go and how much of it your people already have. Tell us who is being trained and we will scope it.

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PostgreSQL for Cloud Engineers

What this course covers.

CL-107 in the role journeys.

Cloud Engineer

Backend Engineer

Roles this course serves

This course is authored to band B3.

Other Cloud courses at this level.

Serverless Engineering on AWS (Lambda · DynamoDB)

Snowflake Core Engineering

Analytics Engineering with dbt

Enterprise BI with Power BI & Tableau

Workflow Orchestration with Airflow

Kubernetes Administration

Run CL-107 for your team.