Capstone Project: Enterprise E-Commerce Platform
Apply everything you’ve learned by building a production-ready e-commerce platform.Project Overview
Build: A globally distributed, highly available e-commerce platform Requirements:- Support 10,000+ concurrent users
- 99.99% availability SLA
- Multi-region deployment
- Complete CI/CD pipeline
- Full observability
- Cost-optimized
- Security-hardened
- Security-hardened
[!WARNING] Gotcha: Front Door Latency Front Door is global, but your backend is regional. If your Front Door sends a user from London to a backend in New York, speed of light latency applies. Always use a backend close to the user or enable caching.
[!TIP] Jargon Alert: Polyglot Persistence Using the “best tool for the job” multiple times in one app. In this project, we use:
- SQL for strict transaction data (Orders)
- Cosmos DB for flexible product catalogs (JSON)
- Redis for fast temporary data (Shopping Carts)
Architecture
Services Used
Frontend
- Azure Static Web Apps
- React SPA
- Azure Front Door (CDN)
Backend
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
- Microservices (Node.js/C#)
- Azure API Management
Data
- Azure SQL (orders, transactions)
- Cosmos DB (product catalog)
- Redis Cache (sessions, cart)
- Blob Storage (images)
DevOps
- GitHub Actions
- Azure DevOps
- Bicep (IaC)
- ArgoCD (GitOps)
Security
- Azure AD B2C (authentication)
- Key Vault (secrets)
- Private Endpoints
- WAF + DDoS Protection
Monitoring
- Application Insights
- Log Analytics
- Azure Monitor
- Dashboards & Alerts
Microservices
1. Product Service
2. Order Service
Infrastructure as Code
Bicep Template
CI/CD Pipeline
GitHub Actions Workflow
Project Deliverables
Success Criteria
Performance
- Page load < 2 seconds
- API response < 100ms (p95)
- Support 10K concurrent users
Availability
- 99.99% uptime SLA
- Automatic failover tested
- Zero-downtime deployments
Security
- No public endpoints (except Front Door)
- All secrets in Key Vault
- WAF enabled and tested
Cost
- Stay under $3,000/month
- Right-sized resources
- Auto-scaling configured
Bonus Challenges
1. Implement Blue-Green Deployment
1. Implement Blue-Green Deployment
Deploy to blue environment, test, then switch traffic
2. Add Search with Cognitive Search
2. Add Search with Cognitive Search
Implement product search with Azure Cognitive Search
3. Implement Chaos Engineering
3. Implement Chaos Engineering
Use Azure Chaos Studio to test resilience
4. Add ML Recommendations
4. Add ML Recommendations
Product recommendations using Azure ML
5. Multi-Region Active-Active
5. Multi-Region Active-Active
Deploy to 3 regions with multi-master Cosmos DB
Congratulations!
You’ve completed the Azure Cloud Engineering Master Course! You now have the skills to: ✅ Design enterprise-grade Azure architectures ✅ Implement high availability and disaster recovery ✅ Optimize costs and performance ✅ Secure cloud environments ✅ Build CI/CD pipelines ✅ Monitor and troubleshoot production systems Next Steps:- Take Azure certifications (AZ-104, AZ-305, AZ-500)
- Build your own projects
- Contribute to open source
- Share your knowledge
- Join our Discord community
- Follow Azure updates
- Attend Azure meetups
- Keep learning!
Defending Your Architecture
In a senior interview, you will be asked to justify your design. Prepare for these questions:Why did you choose AKS over App Service?
Why did you choose AKS over App Service?
Good Answer:
“We chose AKS because our application consists of 5+ distinct microservices. AKS provides better service discovery, bin-packing density for cost savings, and a unified control plane. App Service would require managing 5 separate plans or slots, which becomes unwieldy.”Counter-point: “For a simpler 2-tier app, I would absolutely use App Service for less operational overhead.”
Why Cosmos DB for products and SQL for orders?
Why Cosmos DB for products and SQL for orders?
Good Answer:
“Orders require ACID compliance and strict relational integrity (Foreign Keys), making SQL the best fit.
Product Catalog is high-read, variable schema (different attributes for different types), and needs global low latency. Cosmos DB shines here.”
Why did you separate Read/Write in your code (CQRS)?
Why did you separate Read/Write in your code (CQRS)?
Good Answer:
“We anticipate 100x more reads (browsing products) than writes (placing orders). CQRS allowed us to scale the Read replicas independently and use a denormalized schema for super-fast retrieval without complex JOINs.”
How does your architecture handle a regional outage?
How does your architecture handle a regional outage?
Good Answer:
“Front Door health probes will detect the failure. It will route traffic to the West Europe region.
- Stateless services scale up automatically.
- SQL fails over via Auto-Failover Group.
- Cosmos DB multi-master allows immediate writes.”
Where are your secrets stored?
Where are your secrets stored?
Good Answer:
“Absolutely no secrets are in code or Bicep files.
All secrets are in Key Vault.
The AKS cluster accesses them via Workload Identity (Managed Identity federation). We don’t even manage service principal secrets.”
Key Takeaways
Portfolio Piece
This project is your resume. Push it to GitHub. Write a good README. Draw the architecture diagram.
Breadth & Depth
You touched Networking, Compute, Data, Security, and DevOps. You are now a full-stack Cloud Engineer.
Trade-offs
There is no perfect architecture. Understanding why you made a choice is more important than the choice itself.
Production Ready
Observability and Security make software “Production Ready”. Functionality is just the start.
Continuous Learning
The cloud changes fast. Keep building. Keep breaking. Keep learning.
Course Feedback
We’d love to hear your feedback! Share your experience and help us improve this course.Provide Feedback
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