2.7 Case study — a platform service in depth
You can take one managed platform apart and see the general pattern inside it.
Before:01. Cloud FoundationsUnlocks:03. Storage & Databases
The same thing, three names
One idea, sold under a different brand by each provider. Learn it once and you can read any job advertisement.
- On AWS
- Elastic Beanstalk / App Runner + weighted target groups
- On Azure
- App Service deployment slots + traffic percentages
- On Google Cloud
- App Engine versions + traffic splitting (the textbook example)
One managed platform taken apart carefully teaches more than three skimmed, and this case study does that: versioned deployments, routing between versions, traffic splitting for gradual rollouts, and the three scaling types. It closes the compute module because it exercises everything the module built. The transferable skill is the last item — reading the same three ideas in the other two providers' documentation — because the pattern, not the product, is what you will still be using in ten years.
Work through these
Deploying a versioned application and routing between versions
Deploying an application as a numbered version, then choosing which version receives requests, is the pattern underneath most safe deployment techniques. It is worth seeing once concretely.
Traffic management and traffic splitting for a gradual rollout
Sending a small share of traffic to a new version and increasing it gradually turns a release into a measurement. This is the mechanism behind canary and gradual rollout, whatever a given provider calls it.
Platform service vs raw virtual machines: what you gained and what you gave up
Setting the managed platform beside raw virtual machines makes the exchange explicit: less operational work, less control over the environment. Doing that comparison on a real service is the point of a case study.
Scaling types — manual, basic and automatic — and choosing between them
Manual, basic and automatic scaling suit different traffic shapes and different budgets, and the automatic option is not always the correct one. Choosing deliberately is what this item asks for.
Reading the same three ideas in the other two providers' documentation
The same three ideas appear in all three providers' documentation under different names, and finding them there is the transferable skill. It is also the fastest way to test whether you understood the pattern or memorised a product.
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