What an API is, how SOAP, REST, RPC, and GraphQL differ, and why data architecture runs on APIs like S3, JDBC, ADBC, Hive Metastore, Glue, and Iceberg REST.
How to read AWS EC2 instance names like c6g.large and r5d.4xlarge: what the family letter, generation number, suffixes like g and d, and size each mean.
What data engineers do, how raw data moves through a pipeline to become usable, how the role differs from data science, and how the data stack evolved.
Common data sources, batch versus streaming ingestion, structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, and how to design reliable ingestion pipelines.
