Step 1 of 9 · Intro

Design a site and API on AWS

Serve a growing site with an edge cache, containers and a managed database.

How it works

• ›Amazon CloudFront caches responses at edge locations, so most reads never reach your servers. Only GET responses are cached; writes always go to the origin.
• ›An Application Load Balancer spreads requests across ECS tasks and sends traffic only to targets that pass health checks.
• ›Aurora holds the data. It has one writer and up to 15 readers, so reads scale out but writes do not.
• ›Limits come from AWS documentation (default quotas in us-east-1). Where AWS publishes no figure, such as how many requests a container or database handles, the lab states its assumption on the component.

What you'll build

1. A load balancer, a container service and a database for 600 requests a second
2. A cache or readers that protect the database at 8,000
3. CloudFront in front for 30,000 requests a second
4. A monthly budget: do you still need the cache?
5. A design that survives losing a task
6. How health checks move traffic away from a failed zone