Orientation: Cloud Deployment & DevOps

Welcome! In this curriculum, you'll take your secured Task Organizer Web API and deploy it to public production cloud servers.

[!NOTE] Sequential Prerequisite (Step 4 of 5) This program is Step 4 in your learning path. We recommend completing both the API Design and Authentication & Security courses first, as you will containerize and deploy the exact database API you developed in those courses.

Instead of running only on your local machine (http://127.0.0.1:8000), your API will live on the public internet, accessible from any browser or mobile app in the world.

Safety First: The $0.00 Budget Rule

Cloud computing can get expensive quickly if you configure resources incorrectly. As a software engineer, your first task before creating any cloud resource is establishing a budget fence.

To prevent accidental credit card charges, we use Render and Neon as our primary deployment stack. Both are 100% free, run scale-to-zero compute limits, and do not require credit card entry to sign up.

If you choose the optional GCP Cloud Run track (which does require card verification on signup), you must set up a billing threshold limit of $1.00 immediately during setup.

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Prerequisites

Before starting, ensure you have:

1. The completed, secured Task Organizer API repository from the previous course.
2. The automated pytest test suite passing locally.
3. A free GitHub account.

Let's begin!