Cloud Platforms & Architecture covers: Solutions Architect's Handbook, Learning AWS, AWS Made Simple, Moving to the Cloud, Mastering AWS Development. Understand AWS services deeply, design cloud architectures, and know when to use managed services versus self-hosted solutions. Develop cloud-native thinking. AWS services map directly to Rails infrastructure needs. The question is never "can I do this on AWS?" but "which AWS service is the right fit?" | Rails Need | AWS Service | Why | |-----------|-------------|-----| | PostgreSQL | RDS | Managed backups, replicas, failover | | Redis | ElastiCache | Managed Redis, multi-AZ | | File uploads | S3 + ActiveStorage | Infinite scale, cheap | | Background jobs | SQS + Sidekiq or Lambda | SQS for durability, Lambda for serverless | | Search | OpenSearch | Managed Elasticsearch | | Email | SES | Cheap, reliable, ActionMailer integration | | CDN | CloudFront | Rails asset pipeline → S3 → CloudFront | | Cron jobs | EventBridge + Lambda | Serverless cron, no EC2 needed |
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AWS has over 200 services and they announce new ones every re:Invent like they are trying to break a record. The vastness is paralyzing if you let it be. Do not let it be. For Rai…
Here's a test of cloud literacy that has nothing to do with memorizing services: your Rails app runs happily on one rented server — app, Postgres, Redis, everything on a single bo…
There is a specific moment when AWS stops being a wall of acronyms: the first time you SSH into an EC2 instance you launched, inside a VPC you built, reading credentials from an I…
Quick, without looking anything up: what's the one-sentence job of SQS? When would you pick CloudFront over just serving assets from S3? What does ACM give you that Let's Encrypt …
Nobody greenfields their way into the cloud. The real scenario is always messier: there's an existing app — yours runs fine on a rented server with Kamal — and someone, possibly y…
Every AWS service you've met in this course — every console page, every Terraform resource — is a thin costume over the same thing: an HTTP API. The console is a client. Terraform…
Somewhere in your Rails app there is a job that runs for four seconds, once a day, and to run it you keep a server alive for the other 86,396 seconds. You've never thought of that…
Work through each item before the checkpoint.
Design and deploy a production-grade Rails architecture on AWS. Draw the architecture diagram first: VPC with multi-AZ, public subnets (ALB, bastion), private subnets (EC2/ECS, RD…
9 lessons. Read in order; spiral back when you need to. By the end you'll have used the core ideas twice — once on the abstract, once on something you'll meet at work next week.