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Growth Paths / Cloud Architecture
ExpertSkills

Cloud Architecture

Design systems that survive real failure modes. Trade off consistency against availability with documented reasoning.

Every architecture decision here requires a reviewer who has built systems at scale to challenge your assumptions. Running deployments over documents — every cloud outcome on this path requires a live system the reviewer can inspect and probe, not an architecture diagram that has never been deployed. The OSSU Computer Science curriculum (cs.ossu.dev) covers the distributed systems and networks foundations underpinning cloud architecture — Powstik provides the proof layer on top of it.

0 required outcomes32 weeksCredential on completion

Path outcomes

SkillsOptional

Implement Cloud-Native Design Patterns on a Real Deployment

Elective foundation. Implement 3–5 cloud-native design patterns (circuit breaker, bulkhead, retry, saga, event sourcing) on a real cloud deployment. Proof is the running system URL — reviewer will inspect it during the review and ask what happens when a specific pattern is triggered.

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3 milestones

  1. 1Build a Containerised Microservice Application
  2. 2Implement Observability and Resilience Patterns
  3. 3Document, Present, and Defend the Architecture
SkillsOptional

Design and Deploy a Multi-Region Cloud Architecture

Elective — the path's headline credential. Design and deploy a multi-region active-active or active-passive architecture with failure domain analysis, stated RPO/RTO, and cost-vs-resilience trade-off documentation. Reviewed by a senior cloud architect or SRE who will ask what happens to users in Region A if Region B loses its primary database right now.

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3 milestones

  1. 1Design a Multi-Region Data Architecture
  2. 2Implement and Test Multi-Region Failover
  3. 3Present the Multi-Region Architecture in a Design Review
SkillsOptional

Build a Distributed System

Elective. Implement a distributed system with consensus, fault tolerance, and observable performance characteristics. The practitioner complement to the cloud architecture design steps — building a distributed system requires making every trade-off the architecture documents describe.

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3 milestones

  1. 1Architecture Design Document with Formal Complexity Analysis
  2. 2Build and Deploy with Observability
  3. 3Load Test, Runbook, and Architecture Review with Expert

Resources for this path

No affiliate links. No sponsored placements.

Free Microsoft Press book by the creator of Kubernetes. Covers distributed system patterns (scatter/gather, ambassador, adapter, sidecar) with real implementation examples. Directly relevant to the cloud-native design patterns step.

Amazon's free framework for building reliable, secure, efficient cloud architectures. The five pillars (Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimisation) provide the trade-off vocabulary for the multi-region design step.

The best single-volume treatment of distributed systems concepts: replication, partitioning, consensus, and consistency models. Understanding CAP theorem and linearisability at Kleppmann's level of rigour is what separates cloud architects from cloud users.

The comprehensive map of cloud-native tools and their categories. Use it to understand what exists and why — particularly for the cloud-native patterns step where choosing between circuit breaker implementations (Resilience4j vs Istio vs AWS App Mesh) requires understanding the trade-offs each makes.