Week 5: Shipping Systems, Not Demos
Containers, deployment, runtime isolation, and hardening the path to production.
What the machine expects from you.
This lesson introduces containers as the simplest practical tool for environment reproducibility and service packaging.
AI stacks often involve multiple services, provider SDKs, env vars, and background jobs. Without reproducibility, debugging and deployment become guesswork plus tribal memory.
A container captures enough runtime context to make an application portable and predictable. It is not a full platform, but it is a disciplined contract around execution.
This lesson focuses on deployment architecture as an explainable system, not a pile of platform defaults.
Three dense lessons, one enforced deliverable.
Containers and Reproducible Environments
Reproducibility is a delivery capability, not an ops luxury.
LessonCloud Runtime and Simple Deployment Paths
Your deployment story should be explainable before it is automated.
LessonLeast Privilege, Networking, and Scan Your Surface
Production systems fail at the edges when privileges and exposure are lazy.
What survives the week.
Deployment Plan
A deployment and runtime plan for the course product, including environment separation and rollback thinking.
A local stack blueprint and deployment hardening plan.
Each week leaves behind portfolio evidence that compounds into the final SaaS and its operating narrative.