A hands-on course by Cloud Launchpad
AWS Platform Engineering, hands-on
Build it manually. Automate it with Terraform. Ship it with CI/CD. Thirteen modules take a plain static website from your laptop to a private S3 bucket behind CloudFront, provisioned as code and deployed by GitHub Actions — the same platform documented in this project's own repository.
- 13 modules
- 45 lessons
- Free — AWS free tier
- No sign-up, no backend
Before we start
Why AWS for a static website?
A plain static site — exactly what main contains — could be hosted for free in
about a minute on GitHub Pages,
Cloudflare Pages, Netlify
or Vercel. In fact — look at the address bar. This
course website is itself hosted on GitHub Pages, from this repository's
learning-platform branch. That isn't an accident; it's the point.
We could host the application the same way. But then we'd miss the chance to learn cloud infrastructure, IAM, CDNs, TLS certificates, Infrastructure as Code and a real CI/CD pipeline — the skills this course actually exists to teach. A static site is simply the cheapest, safest place to learn them: low stakes, fast feedback, and an architecture small enough to hold in your head all at once.
What you'll build
A private origin, delivered globally, deployed automatically
By the end of Module 6 this exists in your own AWS account. By the end of Module 9, a
git push is the only step required to update it.
Course pathway
Thirteen modules, one continuous build
Each module leaves the project in a working state and hands you something concrete for the next one. Nothing is theoretical for long — every concept is followed by something you actually do.
Every module
Jump to any module
Progress is tracked per module, entirely in your browser.
Technologies
What this course actually uses
- Amazon S3
- CloudFront
- IAM
- ACM
- Route 53
- Terraform
- GitHub
- GitHub Actions
Prerequisites
- — Comfortable in a terminal (you don't need to know AWS or Terraform yet)
- — Git installed, and a GitHub account
- — An AWS account (the free tier covers this entire course)
- — Python 3, for the simplest possible local web server
You'll be able to
- — Explain why a private origin behind a CDN beats a public bucket
- — Write and reason about real Terraform, not pseudo-code
- — Build a GitHub Actions pipeline authenticated with OIDC, not stored keys
- — Diagnose drift, rollback a bad deploy, and tear a platform down safely