Secure cloud architecture for a delivery startup

Problem

A design brief: propose a secure, scalable cloud architecture for a delivery and payments startup that absorbed a 10× customer surge in a single month without adding headcount. No recipe given — just requirements and a blank canvas.

Approach

• Route 53 for DNS — the front door to everything.
• Elastic Load Balancer distributing traffic with health checks before requests hit compute.
• EC2 + Auto Scaling for horizontally scalable compute that absorbs spikes without manual intervention.
• S3 for assets/backups, RDS for managed relational data, Lambda for event-driven flows (order/payment notifications).
• Security at every layer: IAM least-privilege, MFA, encryption at rest and in transit, security groups.

Stack

Outcome

• A layered architecture justified end-to-end against the brief, scaling to a 10× surge.
• Defense-in-depth security as a cascade of decisions from DNS down to the database — not a single switch.
• The same patterns map directly onto the production systems I work with every week.