W3DevOps Module · Production web: DNS, SSH Hardening, Nginx Reverse Proxy, Let's Encrypt and CDNs

Before PaaS, before Kubernetes, there's a request: a browser asks DNS for an IP, opens a TLS connection, and something on the other end has to route it to your app. This module is about that path — and it's the one I use most when something is broken in production.

What this module covers

• How domain names resolve to IP addresses
• Bare metal vs virtual machines vs cloud instances
• Server hardening and ed25519 SSH keys
• Forward vs reverse proxies and a full production Nginx config (upstream load balancing, TLS termination, WebSocket upgrade)
• One-command TLS with Certbot
• CDNs, S3 + CloudFront, and fixing SPA routing with custom error pages

Lessons in this module

1. Production Deployment Foundations: From Bare Metal to Cloud — Why do we deploy software the way we do? In this foundational chapter from the DevOps Bootcamp, we explore how traffic travels from a user's browser, through DNS and IP routers, to physical and virtual…
2. Nginx: The Universal Reverse Proxy & Web Server — Nginx powers more than one-third of all active websites worldwide. In modern DevOps architectures, you never expose backend processes (like Express, Django, or Spring Boot) directly to the public internet…
3. Storage & Distribution: S3 + CloudFront CDN — Serving static HTML, CSS, JavaScript bundles, and images directly from an application server (like Node.js or Python) consumes valuable CPU cycles and results in sluggish load times for overseas users. The…

Where Nginx lives in my projects

• The Part Timer web container serves the static HR portal through its own nginx.conf, with the API on a separate Cloud Run service.
• All-Star-Dex / Nora frontend ships a production Dockerfile.prod that builds with Node and serves from nginx:alpine — the exact multi-stage pattern from the Docker post.
• Mahesh Travellers goes the other way: next export to 100% static HTML so there's no server at all — just a CDN.
• Coolify puts Traefik in front of every app it deploys, which is the same reverse-proxy idea with automatic Let's Encrypt.

Next and last in the series: self-hosting with Coolify.

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