6. Cloud Infrastructure Is Now the Norm

With the dominance of AWS, GCP, and Azure, the book explores cloud-native data architectures as standard. Engineers must understand managed services (e.g., BigQuery, Redshift), orchestration (Airflow, Dagster), and IaC (Terraform, Pulumi). It's not enough to know SQL or Python — modern DEs must write infrastructure code, understand cost optimization, and secure data systems at scale. The book also warns against cloud overengineering: choose simplicity over abstraction. Strong fundamentals in storage, networking, and compute are still key — even in serverless environments.