☕ Core Backend Engineering Fundamentals

Languages & Frameworks

• Primary Language: Go, Java, Python, or Node.js

• Frameworks: Spring Boot (Java), FastAPI (Python), Gin (Go), Express (Node.js)

• Testing: Unit, integration, and load testing (JUnit, pytest, Go test)

System Design

• Scalability: Load balancers, caching, database sharding

• High Availability & Fault Tolerance

• API Design: REST, GraphQL, gRPC

• Rate limiting, retries, and circuit breakers

• Event-driven architectures (Kafka, SQS, SNS)

Databases

• SQL: PostgreSQL, MySQL (indexes, joins, transactions)

• NoSQL: DynamoDB, MongoDB, Redis

• Data Modeling & Partitioning

Security

• Authentication/Authorization (JWT, OAuth2)

• Encryption (KMS, SSL/TLS)

• Secrets management (AWS Secrets Manager, Parameter Store)

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☁️ 2. AWS Cloud Infrastructure for Backend Engineers

Core AWS Services

Area	Key Services
Compute	EC2, ECS, EKS (Kubernetes), Lambda
Storage	S3, EFS, FSx
Database	RDS (PostgreSQL/MySQL), DynamoDB, Aurora
Networking	VPC, Subnets, Route53, ALB/NLB, Security Groups
Messaging	SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Kinesis
Monitoring	CloudWatch, X-Ray, CloudTrail
Security	IAM (roles, policies), KMS, GuardDuty

DevOps/Deployment

• CI/CD using CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, or GitHub Actions

• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, CloudFormation, or CDK

• Containerization: Docker + ECS/EKS

• Auto Scaling Groups & Load Balancers

Serverless Patterns

• API Gateway + Lambda + DynamoDB

• Step Functions for orchestration

• SQS/SNS for async processing

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🧩 3. Observability, Performance & Reliability

• Metrics & Logging: CloudWatch Metrics/Logs, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana

• Tracing: AWS X-Ray or Jaeger

• Error Tracking: Sentry, Datadog

• Performance Optimization: Caching (Redis, ElastiCache), async jobs, batch processing

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🧠 4. Advanced Topics (for Senior Roles)

• Multi-account strategy and cross-region deployments

• Cost optimization (Spot instances, Savings Plans, S3 lifecycle policies)

• Data pipelines (Kinesis → Lambda → S3/Snowflake)

• API Gateway custom authorizers, WAF integration

• Multi-tenant architecture and feature flags

• Observability pipelines and OpenTelemetry

• AI/ML integration (SageMaker, Bedrock, custom model endpoints)

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📘 5. Hands-on Projects to Practice

• Build a microservice (e.g., Order Service) using Go or Java + PostgreSQL

• Deploy to EKS using Terraform

• Add CI/CD with CodePipeline

• Add SQS for async order processing

• Integrate CloudWatch dashboards and X-Ray tracing