For many, cloud computing is a confusing and overwhelming subject. Not only the concepts are abstract and the service models appear perplexing, but often vendors' implementations conglomerate with a steep learning curve. This presentation is to help technical professionals secure the essentials and fundamental building blocks of a cloud computing solution. This delivery takes a methodical approach and examines five key capabilities, while demonstrating how to integrate them for building, developing, deploying and managing a solution while employing public cloud platform as a datacenter for business in all sizes. The presented solution architecture is vendor agnostic, while all demonstrations are based on Microsoft Azure.