Hands-On: System Design for AWS

Designing systems on AWS is more than just picking a compute service and a database; getting the architecture wrong early on leads to brittle, expensive, and insecure applications. This course is a hands-on guide to building production-ready AWS workloads, structured around the pillars of the Well-Architected Framework. You will start by tracing the complete AWS request path, learning how to terminate traffic at the edge, select the right compute and data tiers, and route uploads directly to object storage. From there, we move into operational excellence, making the workload fully observable by emitting metrics to CloudWatch, aggregating logs centrally, and tracing requests across services. With visibility in place, you will secure the architecture through public and private network segmentation, filtering edge traffic with WAF, and isolating the data layer. You will also implement user authentication with Cognito, handle authorization and throttling at the gateway, and manage credentials using Secrets Manager.

Once your system is secure and observable, the course shifts to reliability and performance. You will learn how to design for failure using redundancy across Availability Zones, health checks, and failover routing, eventually scaling up to survive a complete region outage with backups and cross-region replication. We will cover decoupling asynchronous work using SQS, fanning out events with SNS, and catching failures with a dead-letter queue. To ensure performance efficiency and cost optimization, you will offload static content to a CDN, cache reads with ElastiCache, and scale data access using read replicas and DynamoDB. You will see exactly how these architectural choices impact your bill, applying serverless-first designs for spiky loads and S3 Lifecycle rules to tier cold data. Finally, everything comes together in a series of comprehensive architectural reviews, where we evaluate complete designs for a read-heavy public web app, an event-driven processing system, and a multi-region resilient API.