From Idea to Infra: Building Scalable Systems with Kubernetes, Terraform & Cloud (Detailed)

The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach can lead to technical debt, reactive scaling, and operational fragility if not planned carefully. This guide provides a structured roadmap for transitioning from MVP to enterprise-scale systems, covering practical Terraform and Kubernetes configurations, and strategies for achieving resilience through multi-cloud deployments. The first phase involves selecting the appropriate architecture, with monolithic and microservices architectures being the two main options. A case study of a B2B SaaS platform illustrates the importance of service isolation, asynchronous processing, and cloud-native storage. In the second phase, infrastructure as code is implemented using Terraform, with a modular design and best practices such as environment isolation and state management. The third phase involves deploying applications with Kubernetes, including implementing autoscaling and using Helm charts for reusability. The fourth phase covers CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure and application deployment, with GitHub Actions and secrets management. The fifth phase explores multi-cloud and disaster recovery patterns, including a real-world hybrid cloud pattern and disaster recovery components. The sixth phase focuses on observability and SLO monitoring, with a full-stack observability setup and example Grafana alert and SLO. Finally, a case study of scaling an AdTech platform from 0 to millions of events per day illustrates the importance of careful planning and execution in achieving scalability and reliability.