What it means
They provide a programmable network foundation for workloads and managed services, but isolation and reachability depend on routing, identity, service configuration, and policy working together.
Why it matters
Cloud networks can be created and changed rapidly, making unintended paths and inherited trust difficult to see without continuous validation.
Practical focus
- Design address space and segmentation before large-scale deployment
- Document routing and service dependencies
- Validate actual reachability against intended architecture
Common mistakes
- Treating a VPC or VNet as an automatic security boundary
- Overlapping address ranges that block future connectivity
- Ignoring provider service endpoints and control-plane traffic
Certification relevance
This subject appears in or supports the following certification bodies of knowledge: