2️⃣ Week 2 — Networking, Storage & Real Architectures

Theme: Build production-grade architectures. VPC, RDS, Lambda — the building blocks of every real app. Live session: Sat 30 May 2026 · 3 PM GMT Time commitment: 2 hr live + 5-7 hr labs

🎯 By the end of this week, you’ll have

  • ✅ A custom VPC with public and private subnets
  • ✅ A two-tier app with an EC2 web server talking to an RDS database
  • ✅ A serverless image resizer using S3 + Lambda
  • ✅ Confidence with Security Groups, NACLs, and IAM roles

📚 This week’s content

Item Type Time Link
🎬 Week 2 Slides Live session 2 hr slides/
🛠️ Lab 3 — VPC + RDS Two-Tier Guided lab 90 min lab-3-vpc-rds/
🛠️ Lab 4 — Lambda Image Resizer Build-on-your-own 75 min lab-4-lambda-resizer/
🎯 Week 2 Quiz Interactive 15 min quiz/

📅 Suggested schedule

Day What to do
Sat 30 May Live session 3 PM GMT
Sun 31 May Lab 3 (VPC + RDS) — give this proper time, it’s a chunky one
Mon-Wed Lab 4 (Lambda Resizer)
Thu 4 Jun Quiz + push to your fork
Fri 5 Jun Week 3 drops — sync your fork

🧠 Concepts we’ll cover

  • VPC fundamentals: CIDR blocks, subnets, public vs private
  • Routing: route tables, Internet Gateways, NAT Gateways
  • Security: Security Groups vs NACLs (a favourite exam topic)
  • RDS: managed databases, Multi-AZ, automatic backups
  • Two-tier architecture: the most important pattern in cloud
  • Lambda: serverless functions, event triggers, free tier
  • Pillow Lambda Layer: how to package Python dependencies

🚨 Cost warnings this week

Resource Cost if forgotten
RDS db.t3.micro Free for 750 hrs/month (12 months). After that ~$15/month
NAT Gateway ~$32/month — we’ll avoid this in Lab 3
Lambda + S3 Practically free at bootcamp scale

⚠️ Always clean up after Lab 3: ASG → ALB → EC2 → RDS → VPC. Delete RDS first, it’s the most expensive.

💡 Tips for this week

  • Read the SG vs NACL slide twice — these come up in every cloud interview
  • Lab 3’s biggest gotcha: RDS Multi-AZ requires subnets in 2 different AZs. Plan your VPC accordingly.
  • Lab 4 uses Pillow which isn’t in Lambda by default — we’ll use Klayers’ public ARN

📦 Folder contents

week-02-networking/
├── slides/
│   └── Week2_CloudWithShad.pptx
├── lab-3-vpc-rds/
│   ├── README.md
│   └── Week2_Lab3_VPC_RDS.html
├── lab-4-lambda-resizer/
│   ├── README.md
│   ├── Week2_Lab4_Lambda_Resizer.html
│   └── starter-code/
│       └── lambda_function.py
└── quiz/
    └── Week2_Quiz_Architecture.html

🎓 Submission

After Lab 3 + Lab 4:

  1. Screenshot of your EC2 SSHing into RDS and running a SELECT query
  2. Screenshot of an image you uploaded + the resized thumbnail
  3. Push your IaC/scripts to your fork
  4. Tag posts with #week2done

➡️ Next: Week 3 — Scaling, Automation & DevOps ⬅️ Previous: Week 1 — Foundations ⬅️ Back to repo