[Part 1 – Chap 1 / Section 1] Pick & Prepare a Cloud Provider

🎯 Objective

Choose a free cloud provider and prepare a virtual machine (VM) to serve as the first “playground” for deployments.
This step is about understanding the terrain: each cloud has its own rules (CPU type, memory, networking, limits).
Before designing Docker deployments, I need to see what constraints exist so I can build in a way that works everywhere.

In simple words: a cloud VM is just someone else’s computer, but with its own rules.

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📌 Tasks

• Research free tier providers (Oracle, AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.).
• Select one provider to start with.
• Register an account and set up billing/safety settings.
• Create a small VM instance (Ubuntu or Debian).
• Retrieve public IP and confirm SSH access.
• Open basic ports (22 for SSH, 80 for HTTP).
• Apply system updates.
• Write down system info (CPU type, memory, disk, distro version).

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🧑‍💻 Learning Outcomes

• Understand what it means to register and use a cloud service.
• Know how to create and connect to a virtual machine.
• Recognize that cloud servers are like normal computers but bound by provider-specific rules.
• Learn basic VM hygiene: SSH setup, open ports, updates.

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✅ Definition of Done

• A VM is running on the chosen cloud provider.
• Can SSH into the VM with a non-root user.
• System info documented (arch, memory, disk, firewall rules).
• Journal entry added in docs/part1-chap1/section1-cloud-prep.md with notes + screenshots.