Week 11

Deployment Strategies

Creating Docker Images

Multi-stage builds

Docker Compose

Container Registries

Deploying to the Cloud

Database Migrations

Practice

Assignment

• Teachers

Backend Track

Week 11 Overview

So far you have built REST APIs with Spring Boot, connected them to PostgreSQL, and secured them — but all of that only runs on your local machine. This week, you will learn how to deploy your Spring Boot applications to the cloud and make them accessible over the internet.

Beyond deploying, we will go deeper into Docker and learn how to build our own images, ready to ship to the cloud. You will see why an app runs differently on your laptop than in the cloud: locally you spin up your app and database together with Docker Compose, while in the cloud your app becomes a single deployed container that connects to managed services for its database and file storage.

Getting there means handling a two things every real deployment needs: keeping environment-specific configuration and injecting secrets safely through environment variables instead of hardcoding them. By the end of the week, you will have your own application live on a public URL — deployed by hand, so that next week you can automate the whole process with CI/CD.

Learning goals

• Explain deployment strategies (bare metal, VMs, containers) and containerise a Spring Boot app with a multi-stage Dockerfile, running it locally with Postgres via Docker Compose.
• Manage environment-specific config and inject secrets via environment variables, never in files or source control.
• Apply forward-only SQL migrations, run before deploying the dependent app version.
• Deploy the containerised app to the cloud (Render + Neon), reachable at a public URL.

The HackYourFuture curriculum is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 *https://hackyourfuture.net/*

Built with ❤️ by the HackYourFuture community · Thank you, contributors

Found a mistake or have a suggestion? Let us know in the feedback form.