Cloud Architecture, Reliability & System Design

Module 7. An eight-chapter field guide for senior platform engineers designing and operating reliable cloud services. It covers user-facing SLOs, failure domains, cascading failures, consistency, multi-region recovery, capacity, caching and incident leadership.

Public learning material

All marketplace/SaaS examples are fictional and designed for learning. Provider limits, API behavior, monitoring schema and feature support depend on the deployed version and service configuration. No example represents a verified private infrastructure deployment.

Prerequisites

Linux and container fundamentals; networking and TLS; Kubernetes workloads and scheduling; database transactions; familiarity with one cloud provider.

Learning objectives

• Define business-outcome SLIs, realistic SLOs and error-budget policies.
• Design around node, zone, region, shared-dependency and human-error failure domains.
• Prevent cascading failure using deadlines, bulkheads, bounded queues, backpressure and safe retries.
• Preserve financial/event correctness through idempotency, authoritative storage and an outbox.
• Choose active-passive or active-active recovery only after defining RPO/RTO and fencing.
• Forecast peak capacity and include autoscaling delay plus downstream saturation.
• Design cache degradation that never violates authoritative write semantics.
• Lead an evidence-driven incident, verify recovery and invest in tested corrective actions.

Eight chapters

1. SLIs, SLOs, error budgets and reliability governance
2. High availability, multi-zone design and failure domains
3. Deadlines, retries, circuit breaking and backpressure
4. Transaction correctness, consistency and event delivery
5. Multi-region architecture, disaster recovery and RPO/RTO
6. Peak capacity, autoscaling and load testing
7. Data-layer reliability, caching and degradation
8. Incident leadership, game days and cost trade-offs

Practice and sequence

Read Q1-Q2 to define what must work, Q3-Q4 to preserve behavior under partial failure, Q5-Q7 to build resilient infrastructure/data paths, and Q8 to practice operating the design. Then complete seven labs and rehearse 40 advanced technical FAQs.

Authoritative references

• Google SRE book
• Google SRE workbook: alerting on SLOs
• AWS Well-Architected Reliability Pillar
• Kubernetes scheduling and topology
• PostgreSQL transaction isolation

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