An app that serves ten users and an app that serves ten million rarely look the same under the hood. Architecture is how you structure your backend, and scaling is how you keep it responsive as traffic, data, and the team behind it all grow.
You'll start with the trade-offs between a monolith and microservices, then follow a system as it scales from a single server to millions of users. From there the module covers the tools that make scaled systems practical: Docker for packaging your app into containers, Kubernetes for running those containers at scale, and Kafka for moving messages between services without tying them together.
With the structure of a larger system in mind, you'll be ready for the final module, NoSQL & Observability, which looks at other ways to store data and how to see what your running system is doing.
How a monolith keeps everything in one tightly coupled codebase, how microservices split an app into small independent services, and the trade-offs of each.
A step-by-step walk from a single server to a system that serves millions of users, adding load balancers, database replication, caching, and CDNs along the way.
The basics of Dockerfiles, images, and containers, and why packaging your app this way is a required skill for almost every developer.
A quick look at Kubernetes and how it is used to scale containers to massive workloads in the cloud.
A short introduction to Apache Kafka, a distributed messaging and streaming platform for passing data between services at scale.