Module 3 · The cloud, on the free tier Lesson 7 of 15

What a VM, a bucket and a load balancer are

Worked example

Uploading a file to storage rather than serving it from the application server is why a video site does not fall over. That one design decision comes up constantly in interviews.

Your practice task

Draw your own project as boxes — server, storage, database — and label which piece would break first under heavy traffic.

Do this before moving on. Reading a solution teaches the shape of it; typing it teaches you.

Key takeaway

A virtual machine is a computer somebody else runs; object storage holds files; a load balancer spreads requests across machines. Three ideas, and the menus in every cloud console are variations of them.

Almost there

15 lessons left of 15

Finish every lesson to unlock the certificate. Each one ends in a practice task — do them and the final project brief writes itself.