4.1. Managing Compute Resources
💡 First Principle: Operating compute resources day-to-day is fundamentally about visibility and control over things that are already running — a different mental mode than Phase 3's "what should we deploy," and one where the exam tests whether you know the specific operational commands and views for each platform, not just the platform's capabilities.
A deployed solution that nobody can observe or adjust after launch isn't actually operational — it's a one-time deployment waiting to become a future incident. This domain exists because "we deployed it" and "we can keep it healthy" are genuinely different competencies, and real production environments live or die on the second one.
⚠️ Common Misconception: Snapshots and images are two names for the same backup mechanism. In reality, snapshots are incremental point-in-time backups of a persistent disk, while images are boot-disk templates used to create new VM instances — related but used for different purposes.
