Scalable AWS Cloud Architecture

This video course will teach you how to build a resilient server architecture on AWS that scales automatically with demand.

Most SaaS and mobile app companies are backed by a central backend server that hosts an API or website. Architecting this server in a scalable way from the beginning is important so you can focus on building features and learning about the customer instead of worrying about handling increasing amounts of traffic. Improving the architecture after problems arise not only repels customers, but is also very costly and stressful.

What this course will teach you

This course will teach you on how to set up your scalable server architecture on AWS in a matter of hours so you are ready for scale from day one. You'll learn about cloud security, load balancing, auto scaling groups and how the deployment and build processes can be fully automated, so you can deploy your code to an arsenal of auto-scaled server instances by simply pushing to a Git repository, with zero downtime. You'll also save money by only using the least amount of resources you need for your current amount of traffic and scaling automatically.

It explains all the important concepts along the way, guiding you to make your own decisions for your specific needs. You will receive theory sessions, PDF slides and hands-on screencast tutorials.

About the instructor

The course is created by me, Florian Pfisterer. I have worked as a CTO and lead software engineer at several startups, re-architecting the cloud architecture as traffic exploded multiple times. I hold a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from KIT and CMU and have also been an intern at HubSpot Inc.

Throughout the last 2.5 years I have led a rapidly growing sports app startup to build a secure, scalable API backend through many iterations, making it increasingly robust, resilient and scalable. This is the course I wish I had 2 years ago, starting out to build our startup's API service. It would have saved us months of experimentation and research.

It will do the same for you as a technical co-founder or developer in a startup tasked with setting up the backend server in the right way, from day one, so you can avoid overwhelmed servers and unhappy customers because you can't handle the traffic. If you already have a running server in place, it will guide you on how you can improve its robustness and resilience to scale.

Course content

Each topic is divided into a theory session and a hands-on tutorial screencast. Take notes to understand the general concepts in the theory sessions. Then, follow along in the tutorials, so you will have a fully functional and scalable server architecture running in your AWS account by the end of the course.

Chapter 1: Introduction 4:21min
Overview of what we will build. Free preview available (see above).

Chapter 2: VPC & Security 11:17min theory + 10:48min tutorial
The first step in building our scalable server architecture is making sure it is secure. In this chapter, we will learn about AWS's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and set up our own private subsection of AWS that we will later put our servers in. You'll learn about firewalls and having different subnets for public resources (servers) and private resources (e.g., a database).

Chapter 3: Load Balancing and DNS 06:48min theory + 19:53min tutorial
In order to be able to distribute incoming traffic to potentially multiple servers, we will set up a load balancer and associate it to your own api.your-startup.com domain. We will also set up a free TLS certificate such that all traffic is encrypted. The load balancer will distribute traffic to a variable number of server instances (dynamically scaled based on demand).

Chapter 4: Instances and Auto Scaling 09:40min theory + 18:49min tutorial
Our auto scaling group will provision and configure new EC2 instances based on demand. We will then configure the auto scaling group to dynamically add or remove instances to the fleet based on custom demand metrics we set up.

Chapter 5: CI/CD Pipeline + Conclusion 06:36min theory + 39:08min tutorial
The final step that ensures seamless scaling on demand is to set up a continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline that builds, tests and deploys our code on each instance. All we need to do then is to push the code to a Git repository, which triggers our pipeline. We will discuss different zero-downtime deployment types and set up a health check that ensures new instances are healthy before directing traffic to them.

Total duration: 35min (theory sessions) + 1h 29min (hands-on tutorials)

Refund policy

If you're not 100% satisfied with the purchase, or it's not what you were expecting, just reply to the download email within 30 days, and you'll get a full refund. No questions asked.

Happy Customers Say

"I highly recommend Florian's course. My 9-to-5 work is solving ML problems at Google so I looked into this topic out of curiosity. Why the recommendation? Florian has a very structured approach to teaching: he explains the theoretical bits first and then shows how things can be concretely done in the AWS console. That way one links theory and actual usage (which is what matters in the end)."

— Timo Denk | Software Engineer @ Google

"This is an awesome course that can drive you crazy about how you can design a robust architecture on a cloud platform using vpc, load balancing, ec2, cicd etc and is very helpful to design the best system out of the box. The course is designed in such a way that it is simple to understand and easier to do hands-on practice. I would say thanks to Florian that this course is helping in my career as a software engineer."

— Ghulam Moinuddin | Senior Software Engineer @ Indus Net Technologies