Cloud as Lego Bricks

Narrated

You have a real application now. Authentication, database, file uploads, background jobs, queues, payments, GDPR compliance, monitoring, Docker containers, load balancing. You built all of this. It works.

And right now, you’re probably paying around fifty dollars a month to host it. Maybe on Railway, maybe on Render, maybe on some other platform-as-a-service that made it easy to get started. That was the right call. When you were learning, you needed simple. You needed “push and it works.” You needed training wheels.

But here’s what those training wheels cost you. You’re paying a premium for convenience. Your database is sitting on the same machine as your application. Your file storage is whatever the platform gives you, with limits you didn’t choose. Your static files, your CSS, your JavaScript, your images, they’re being served from one location, which means someone in Tokyo waits three times longer than someone in New York. And if you ever want to do something the platform doesn’t support, you’re stuck.

This is the wall every growing application hits. The platform that got you started is now the platform that’s holding you back.

The solution isn’t to build your own data center. The solution is to think about the cloud the way you think about Lego bricks. Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud, these aren’t monolithic things you have to understand completely. They’re catalogs of individual pieces. You pick the pieces you need, snap them together, and build exactly the infrastructure your app requires. Nothing more, nothing less.

You don’t need to become a cloud engineer. You don’t need to memorize services or pass a certification exam. You just need the mental model of what pieces exist, what they do, and how they connect. Claude Code handles the actual configuration.

Let’s open the catalog.