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Beginner · 5h 15m · 20 lessons

Cloud & Deployment Basics

Demystify the cloud and ship your first site with confidence.

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What you'll learn

  • ✦Explain what the cloud really is and work out when renting computers beats buying them
  • ✦Compare servers and serverless, and choose the right one for a project's traffic and jobs
  • ✦Decide between static and dynamic hosting from what each page of a site needs
  • ✦Trace how DNS turns a domain name into the address of a real server
  • ✦Set up environment variables so API keys and other secrets stay out of your code and Git history
  • ✦Explain the difference between build time and runtime, and decide when each setting gets read
  • ✦Read a CI/CD pipeline and explain what each stage does and why a failure stops it
  • ✦Diagnose problems after you ship with logs and monitoring, and roll back a bad deploy safely
  • ✦Plan how to scale an app out behind a load balancer and ship new versions with zero downtime
  • ✦Explain containers and infrastructure as code, and keep cloud costs and backups under control

Part of these career paths

Certification projects

Build 4 projects to earn your certificate

Hands-on work that proves you can apply what you learned — part of the certificate requirements.

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Syllabus

Module 1 · 1h 8m
What the cloud really is Free
What you'll be able to do
  • Can explain what the cloud physically is and tell a rented cloud setup from an owned one
  • Can work out, in server-days, when renting for a peak costs less than sizing for it
  • Can compare an always-on server with serverless functions and find the break-even
  • Can decide which pages of a site need static or dynamic hosting
Module 2 · 52m
Names, config & secrets Locked
What you'll be able to do
  • Can trace a DNS lookup and choose between an A record and a CNAME
  • Can work out when a DNS change reaches visitors, using the TTL
  • Can move settings into environment variables and set them on a laptop and on a host
  • Can keep secrets out of Git, and rotate a key in the right order after a leak
Module 3 · 1h 10m
Building & shipping Locked
What you'll be able to do
  • Can sort a setting into build time or runtime and predict when a change needs a rebuild
  • Can explain what CI and CD automate, and choose continuous delivery or deployment for a project
  • Can read a pipeline's stages, find the one that failed and order stages to fail fast
  • Can deploy a site from a Git repo and tell build, runtime and DNS problems apart
Module 4 · 48m
After you ship Locked
What you'll be able to do
  • Can pick the right environment (dev, staging or production) and the right data for a change
  • Can read log lines and health numbers like error rate to find what broke, and when
  • Can decide when to roll back a bad deploy, and when damaged data also needs a backup restore
Module 5 · 38m
Scaling & reliability Locked
What you'll be able to do
  • Can tell scaling up from scaling out, and work out how many servers a peak needs with a spare
  • Can explain how a load balancer and its health checks keep a site up when one server fails
  • Can pick blue-green, canary or a rolling update to ship a new version without downtime
Module 6 · 39m
Cost & operations Locked
What you'll be able to do
  • Can explain how a container image and its containers end "works on my machine"
  • Can read a small infrastructure-as-code file and predict what applying it will change
  • Can estimate a cloud bill from an hourly price, set a budget alert, and prove a backup works by restoring it

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