As a developer, getting good at working in the cloud is essential to improving your upward mobility and keeping yourself marketable. While there is no silver bullet to solving cloud development challenges, there is one strategy that will help you troubleshoot any strange were-error message the cloud can throw at you: building your own mental model of how cloud networking works. AWS, Azure, and Google clouds are all built on APIs and software-defined networks. Every "weird" problem I've faced in the cloud had some network-related defect at the core of it. In this talk, we'll discuss a clear, concise, easy to understand mental model for reasoning about cloud networking that you can use to solve any problem you'll face working in the cloud. Come with your questions, stories, and scars: this is a safe place for us all to heal and learn!