Architecting Scalable Applications and Systems

About This Specialization

Most training at this level teaches a vendor’s console or a certification syllabus. The console gets redesigned and the exam objectives get revised, and the decisions that actually broke your last system were in neither one.

Systems rarely fail because nobody knew how to write the code. They fail because a decision made two years ago was never revisited.

These three courses are about those decisions. Availability first, then cloud architecture, then the risk that sits between them. Each one reuses the vocabulary the one before it set, so service tiers turn up again as a spending decision, and again as a severity score.

They stand alone. Taken in order, the third one is easier.

The courses name real services as examples of decisions somebody had to make. No lesson is built around one of them, so the reasoning stays useful as the platforms keep changing.

What You’ll Learn

• Measuring availability, and setting targets the business can actually use
• Classifying services into tiers, with a single owning team on each one
• Placing any workload across public, private, and hybrid deployment, with lock-in priced rather than feared
• Weighing managed services against building in-house, and knowing exactly what you traded away
• Running infrastructure as versioned code
• Treating cloud cost as an architectural constraint you design against
• Building a risk matrix for your own systems, and defending every row of it
• Setting recovery objectives per service tier, and knowing the cost curve behind each one
• Carrying technical risk into a planning conversation and having it change the roadmap

The Three Courses

Scalable Availability in Software Architecture. What availability means, how to measure it, and what an internal SLA is for. Service tiers get set here, and single-team ownership with them. Five modules, about 8 hours. Learn more →

Cloud Architecture for Scalable Systems. Where a workload belongs, and what buy versus build actually costs. How to put cost on an architecture diagram, run infrastructure as versioned code, and stop a migration halfway without leaving a mess. Five modules, about 10 hours. Learn more →

Risk Management for Scalable Systems. Risk as a portfolio you manage on purpose. You build a matrix for your own systems from the template that ships with the course, score it honestly, and use it to win the arguments that decide the roadmap. Six modules, about 12 hours. Learn more →

Who This Is For

Architects who own design decisions across several teams. Senior technical leaders responsible for systems they no longer write code for, and the operations leaders carrying the pager for other people’s choices.

Developers moving toward technical leadership will get a head start on the part of the job nobody trains them for.

It assumes you have built or run a distributed system and have seen it behave badly. It assumes no cloud certification, no coding exercises, and no formal risk or audit background.

Program Structure

Three courses, 16 modules, about 30 hours. Coursera’s badge suggests eight weeks at four hours a week.

There is no capstone, on purpose. The work happens against your own systems, course by course. You classify your own services into tiers, place your own workloads, price a real buy-versus-build decision, and build a risk matrix you keep using after the certificate arrives.

The quizzes check that the concepts landed. The matrix is the thing you keep.