Cloud, DevOps & Deployment

Welcome to the Kaern Schools studio. This is a hands-on course for founders building Kaern startups — people who write the code and own the consequences when it falls over at 2am. We will not learn cloud as trivia. We will learn it the way you actually meet it: shipping a real product on a real stack.

That stack is cycleX: a Cloudflare Workers + KV edge layer in front of static pages on GitHub Pages, deployed automatically by GitHub Actions, with a Shopify storefront handling checkout. You will see those exact pieces over and over, because that is what your company runs on.

Outcomes. By the end you will be able to: take a service from laptop to public URL on your own; wire a CI/CD pipeline that tests before it ships; reason about serverless and edge trade-offs; manage environments, config, and secrets without leaking them; instrument a service so you find out about failure before your customers do; and make scaling and cost decisions with numbers instead of vibes.

Your tutor. I'm Ada. I've shipped, broken, and rescued production systems, and I teach by analogy first and jargon second. I will keep asking you why, because a founder who only knows how is one outage away from being stuck. Every lesson ends with a question — answer it before you move on. That's the deal.

Six modules. Each builds on the last. Let's open the studio.

Module 1 — Cloud Fundamentals

Learning objectives

• Explain the cloud as renting capability rather than owning machines, and why that matters for a startup's cash and speed.
• Distinguish IaaS, PaaS, and managed/serverless offerings using the cycleX stack as a map.
• Describe the shared responsibility model and identify who owns what when something breaks.
• Read a region/availability-zone diagram and reason about latency and failure domains.

Lesson 1.1 — What "the cloud" actually is

Teaching script

Everyone, picture two bakeries. In the first, you buy the oven, the building, the electrical wiring, and you pray the oven survives a busy Saturday. In the second, you rent oven-time by the tray: busy day, you grab ten ovens; quiet day, you grab one and pay for one. The cloud is the second bakery. You stopped buying ovens.

Why does this matter so much for you specifically? Because as a founder your scarcest resources are cash and time, and owning servers spends both before you have a single customer. The cloud converts a big upfront capital cost into a small pay-as-you-go cost, and it converts "wait six weeks for hardware" into "deploy in six minutes."

But — and this is the catch I want lodged in your head — renting is not free of responsibility. You don't own the oven, yet you still own the recipe, the ingredients, and whether you locked the front door. Our cycleX pages live on GitHub's machines and Cloudflare's edge; we never touch the hardware, but a leaked API key is still entirely our fault.

So when someone says "we're on the cloud," the real question is: which parts did we rent, and which parts are still ours to get right? What do you think you still own when you deploy to GitHub Pages?

Lesson 1.2 — IaaS, PaaS, and "someone else runs it"

Teaching script

Let's sort the menu, because "cloud" is three different meals. Think of housing. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is renting an empty apartment — you get walls and plumbing, but you bring furniture, you mop the floors, you fix what you install. That's a raw virtual machine: total control, total chores.

PaaS (Platform as a Service) is a serviced apartment — furnished, cleaned, you just live and work. You hand over your code and the platform runs it. GitHub Pages is essentially this for static sites: we never patch a web server, we just push files.

Then there's the managed / serverless tier — a hotel. You don't even think about the room between stays; you show up, it's ready, you pay per night. Cloudflare Workers is this: our code runs on demand at the edge and we never see a server at all. Shopify is managed even higher up — an entire commerce platform we rent wholesale.

Here's why founders get this wrong: more control feels safer, so they reach for IaaS and drown in maintenance instead of building product. The cycleX stack deliberately climbs as high up the menu as it can — Pages, Workers, Shopify — so the team spends time on the bicycle-washing business, not on patching Linux. Looking at our stack, which piece gives us the least control, and is that a problem or a gift?

Worked example

Map each cycleX component to its service model and name what we still own:

| Component | Model | We still own | |---|---|---| | GitHub Pages (static site) | PaaS | The HTML/CSS/JS content, the repo, build correctness | | Cloudflare Workers + KV | Serverless / FaaS | The Worker code, KV keys/values, routing logic | | Shopify storefront | Managed SaaS | Product data, theme, checkout config, secrets |

Notice the pattern: as we move down the table we own less infrastructure and more configuration and data. The bugs migrate accordingly — fewer "the server died," more "we configured it wrong."

Hands-on exercise

Draw your own startup's stack on one page. For every component, write three columns: (1) what service model it is, (2) what the provider runs for you, (3) what you still own and could break. Then circle the single component where a mistake would hurt customers fastest. Bring that circle to the next lesson — it's usually where your incidents will come from.

Common mistakes

• Confusing "managed" with "I don't have to think about it." Managed means the infrastructure is handled; your config and data are still yours to ruin.
• Reaching for raw VMs (IaaS) by default because it feels more "real." It's mostly more chores. Climb the menu unless you have a concrete reason not to.
• Assuming cloud is always cheaper. Pay-as-you-go is cheap until traffic is huge and predictable — then owning can win. It's a trade-off, not a law.

Check for understanding

1. In one sentence, what is the core economic shift the cloud makes for a startup?
2. Classify Cloudflare Workers as IaaS, PaaS, or serverless, and justify it in one line.
3. On GitHub Pages, name two things the provider owns and two things you still own.