Deploying to a Cloud Platform
5 min read
Module Overview
What You’ll Learn
- Compare the common categories of hosting platform for a Node.js API
- Deploy a containerized application to a real cloud platform
- Configure production environment variables and a custom domain on a live deployment
💡 Why this matters: Every module before this one has been preparation, a correctly configured, containerized, tested application, sitting on a laptop, still reachable by no one. This module is where it actually goes live.
What’s Covered
- Categories of hosting, platform-as-a-service, a managed container platform, and a raw virtual machine, and the real trade-offs between them.
- A real deployment, pushing a containerized application to a cloud platform and getting back a live URL.
- Production environment variables, setting real secrets on a real platform, correctly, never in source control.
- Custom domains and zero-downtime deploys, what changes once real users depend on an application staying up during a release.
Hands-On
By the end of this module, you’ll understand exactly what a real deployment to a real platform involves, end to end, from a pushed commit to a live, reachable URL.
Next module: putting a reverse proxy in front of that deployment, and terminating HTTPS correctly.