3️⃣ Week 3 — Scaling, Automation & DevOps

Theme: Make your apps survive traffic spikes and deploy themselves. Live session: Sat 6 Jun 2026 · 3 PM GMT Time commitment: 2 hr live + 5-7 hr labs

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

  • ✅ An auto-scaling application that adds servers automatically when traffic spikes
  • ✅ A working Application Load Balancer distributing traffic across servers
  • ✅ A CI/CD pipeline that auto-deploys every git push to AWS
  • ✅ A clear understanding of DevOps fundamentals

📚 This week’s content

Item Type Time Link
🎬 Week 3 Slides Live session 2 hr slides/
🛠️ Lab 5 — Auto-Scaling + ALB Guided lab 90 min lab-5-autoscaling-alb/
🛠️ Lab 6 — CI/CD Pipeline Build-on-your-own 75 min lab-6-cicd-pipeline/
🎯 Week 3 Quiz Interactive 15 min quiz/

📅 Suggested schedule

Day What to do
Sat 6 Jun Live session 3 PM GMT
Sun 7 Jun Lab 5 (Auto-scaling + ALB)
Mon-Wed Lab 6 (CI/CD pipeline)
Thu 11 Jun Quiz + push
Fri 12 Jun Week 4 (the AI capstone week!) drops

🧠 Concepts we’ll cover

  • Why one server isn’t enough — and the cost of forgetting that
  • Vertical vs horizontal scaling — when each one wins
  • Application Load Balancer (ALB) — how it spreads traffic and detects unhealthy servers
  • Auto Scaling Groups (ASG) — launch templates, min/desired/max, scaling policies
  • CloudWatch — the sensor that triggers scaling
  • CI/CD pipelines — what CI really means, what CD really means
  • GitHub Actions — the easiest CI/CD platform for AWS deploys

🚨 Big cost warning

Lab 5 uses an Application Load Balancer. ALBs cost ~$0.50/day even with zero traffic.

DELETE THE ALB the same day you finish Lab 5. Don’t leave it running overnight.

Cleanup order: ASG → ALB → Target Group → Launch Template. Get this wrong and Auto Scaling will keep trying to register new instances with a deleted ALB.

💡 Tips for this week

  • Lab 5 is the most expensive lab in the bootcamp (~$1 total if you clean up promptly). Plan to do it in one sitting.
  • Lab 6 turns into your CI/CD demo for life — make it look nice, the GitHub repo is your portfolio piece
  • Never commit AWS keys to git — Lab 6 covers this, but seriously, never do it

📦 Folder contents

week-03-scaling-devops/
├── slides/
│   └── Week3_CloudWithShad.pptx
├── lab-5-autoscaling-alb/
│   ├── README.md
│   └── Week3_Lab5_AutoScaling_ALB.html
├── lab-6-cicd-pipeline/
│   ├── README.md
│   ├── Week3_Lab6_CICD_Pipeline.html
│   └── starter-code/
│       └── deploy.yml
└── quiz/
    └── Week3_Quiz_Pipeline.html

🎓 Submission

After Lab 5 + Lab 6:

  1. Screenshot of your ASG Activity history showing scale-out AND scale-in events
  2. Screenshot of a successful GitHub Actions workflow run + your live S3 URL
  3. Push your deploy.yml to your fork
  4. Tag posts with #week3done

➡️ Next: Week 4 — AI Services & Capstone ⬅️ Previous: Week 2 — Networking ⬅️ Back to repo