learning-by-practice

Hands-on labs for backend infrastructure concepts.

Labs

1. Cache (Redis)

• DB Caching - Reduce database load with Redis cache
• Cache Invalidation - TTL vs manual invalidation
• Session Sharing - Share sessions across multiple app instances

2. Load Balancer (Nginx)

• Round-robin distribution across multiple backends

3. Monitor (Prometheus + Alertmanager)

• Health checks with Prometheus
• Alert rules when server goes down
• Metrics collection (/metrics endpoint)

4. Reverse Proxy (Nginx + SSL)

• SSL termination at reverse proxy
• Self-signed certificate generation
• HTTP → HTTPS redirect
• Security headers

5. Logging (ELK Stack)

• Centralized logging with Elasticsearch, Kibana, Filebeat
• JSON structured logging for easy parsing
• Log aggregation from multiple app instances
• Search and visualize logs in Kibana

6. Software Architecture

• 3-Tier Architecture - Presentation → Business → Data layers
• Clean Architecture - Dependency inversion, swappable infrastructure
• When to use which

7. System Design

• Monolith vs Microservices - When to split
• API Gateway - Nginx routing, single/multi host setup
• Service Discovery - Consul for dynamic service registration

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Quick Start

Each lab runs with Docker Compose:

cd <lab-folder>
docker compose up --build