Phase 2 - Platform And Delivery Core

This phase is about building the platform layer: cloud resources, pipelines, containers, Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code.

Goal

By the end of this phase, you should be able to take an application from source code to a repeatable deployment running on cloud infrastructure.

Study Order

1. ../../04_Infrastructure_as_Code_and_Cloud/Cloud_Services/README.md

2. ../../02_Version_Control_and_CI_CD/Jenkins_CICD/README.md

3. ../../02_Version_Control_and_CI_CD/Jenkins_CICD/end-to-end-ci-cd-pipeline.md

4. ../../03_Containers_and_Orchestration/README.md

5. ../../04_Infrastructure_as_Code_and_Cloud/Terraform/README.md

6. ../../07_Interview_Preparation/interview-questions-easy.md

7. ../../07_Interview_Preparation/interview-questions-medium.md

What To Master

Cloud Platform Basics

• compute, storage, networking, IAM, and managed services

• public versus private networking

• why availability zones and regions matter

• when to use managed services versus self-hosted systems

CI/CD

• build, test, scan, package, publish, deploy, verify

• artifact immutability

• promotion between environments

• rollback and approval controls

Docker

• images, containers, layers, registries, volumes, and networking

• Dockerfile best practices

• multi-stage builds and small runtime images

Kubernetes

• pods, deployments, services, ingress, config maps, secrets, probes

• resource requests and limits

• rollout behavior and basic troubleshooting

IaC

• Terraform providers, modules, state, backends, and locking

• Ansible for post-provision configuration

• drift and why click-ops are risky

Hands-On Tasks

1. Containerize a small application with a multi-stage Docker build.

2. Create a simple CI pipeline that builds, tests, and publishes an image.

3. Deploy the application to Kubernetes with health checks.

4. Provision the target environment with Terraform using a remote backend.

5. Document the release flow from commit to production.

Checkpoint Questions

• Why should the same artifact move from staging to production?

• What is the difference between a Deployment and a StatefulSet?

• Why are Terraform state locking and remote backends important?

• When would you use a cloud load balancer versus an ingress controller?

• How do Docker layers affect build performance?

Exit Criteria

Move to Phase 3 only when you can:

• explain an end-to-end CI/CD flow clearly

• containerize and deploy an app to Kubernetes

• explain Service, Ingress, probe, and rollout behavior

• describe Terraform state, backends, modules, and drift

• connect cloud architecture decisions to delivery and reliability