An architecture on paper, a free tier understood, and a deploy story read

The situation

Before you open a single cloud account, you will do what most people skip: describe the infrastructure behind an app you used today, read exactly what the free tiers include and exclude, draw a simple online shop's architecture with the one thing that must never be public, write out the setup a Dockerfile would replace, and read a real company's account of a bad deploy. Then decide, honestly, whether this field is for you.

What you'll be able to show

• See the infrastructure behind an everyday app
• Know the boundary of a free tier before touching it
• Draw an architecture and identify what must stay private
• Understand what containers and rollbacks are for, from real stories

What you need

• The AWS free tier page and the Azure free account page
• Paper for the diagram
• One public post-mortem of an outage (search: post-mortem outage rollback)

Tasks

1. 1Behind one app
   Pick one app or site you used today. Write in plain language what must exist for it to work: where the pictures are stored, where your login is checked, what happens when a thousand people use it at once.
   A correct result: A plain-language description covering storage, authentication and load.
2. 2The free-tier boundary
   Read the AWS free tier and Azure free account pages. Write two things that are free for twelve months and one thing that is not free at all, for each.
   A correct result: Six facts, with the page URLs.
3. 3The shop, drawn
   Sketch how a simple online shop sits in a cloud: where the website runs, where product photos live, where orders are stored, which of those the public reaches directly. Mark the one thing that must NOT have a public address.
   A correct result: A photographed diagram with the database marked private.
4. 4What a Dockerfile replaces
   For a project you have built, write every setup step somebody would need: every install, every version, every configuration file. Be complete. Count the steps.
   A correct result: The full setup list and its step count — the length is the point.
5. 5A bad deploy, read
   Read one company's public post-mortem of an outage. Write: what changed, how long until they knew, how they rolled back, and what they changed afterwards.
   A correct result: Four answers from the post-mortem, with its link.
6. 6The honest decision
   Two sentences: the part of this that genuinely interests you, and the part you suspect you would find tedious. Then decide whether to continue into cloud, and say why. Not continuing is a legitimate outcome.
   A correct result: Two sentences and a decision with a reason.

What to hand in

The app description, the six free-tier facts, the diagram photo, the setup list with count, the post-mortem notes, and the decision.

How it is marked