What the program covers
Session Breakdown
-
Session 1-2: How servers handle requests
Web servers, application servers, load balancers. What happens at scale.
-
Session 3-4: Cloud infrastructure basics
IaaS, PaaS, SaaS distinctions. Major providers compared. Cost structures and trade-offs.
-
Session 5: Containers and deployment
What Docker solves, how Kubernetes fits in, why this matters for release cycles.
-
Session 6: Monolith vs microservices
When each architecture makes sense. Real costs of switching. How team structure affects the choice.
-
Session 7: Reliability and monitoring
Uptime, redundancy, alerting. Reading dashboards. Understanding incident reports.
-
Session 8: Decision-making workshop
Participants bring real infrastructure questions from their organizations. Group analysis and discussion.
About this course
At some point, running a digital product means making calls about servers, hosting, and architecture. Monolith or microservices. Cloud or on-premise. Managed services or custom setup. These decisions have long-term consequences and they often land on people who did not study computer science.
The actual problem
Most managers in this position either defer entirely to engineers or make decisions based on incomplete information. Both create friction. This course gives you enough context to participate meaningfully in architectural discussions.
What the curriculum focuses on
We cover how web servers work, what cloud providers actually offer, how containerization with tools like Docker changes deployment, and what SLA metrics mean in practice. No lab work, but plenty of real scenarios.
Case-based learning
Each session includes a case from an actual business context: a startup choosing between AWS and a VPS, a company dealing with downtime after a traffic spike, a team migrating from a monolith. You analyze and discuss, not just listen.
Duration and commitment
Eight sessions over four weeks. About two hours per session including discussion. Expect to spend another 30 minutes per week on reading.