Deploying code manually gets old fast. I will build this pipeline to automate the entire process — Terraform will provision the AWS infrastructure, Docker will package the app consistently across environments, and GitHub Actions will handle testing and deployment on every push. What started as frustration with repetitive steps will become a fully automated system that mirrors how engineering teams ship at scale.
Running an application without visibility into what it's doing feels like flying blind. I will build this monitoring environment on Kubernetes to change that — Prometheus will scrape real-time metrics, Grafana will turn them into dashboards, and custom alerts will fire before small issues become outages. It's the kind of setup SRE teams rely on in production, and building it will teach me exactly why.
Most tutorial projects live on one server and fall apart under any real load. I will build something structured the way production apps actually are — a serverless API on AWS Lambda, a managed database on RDS, and secrets handled properly through AWS Secrets Manager. The goal is to understand not just how to ship an app, but how to build one that could scale.