i recently finished building and deploying a 3-tier application, starting locally on minikube and then migrating it to aws eks. this post is about what i built, how it all connects, and a couple of things that tripped me up along the way as a beginner who recently completed the aws certified cloud practitioner (clf-c02) exam and the kubernetes and cloud native associate (kcna) certification. what i built a simple 3-tier app with: a frontend — nginx serving an html page a backend — node.js api a database — mongodb the full picture browser → aws alb → ingress → frontend pod (nginx) → backend pod (node.js) → database pod (mongodb) → ebs volume (persistent storage) nothing really fancy, just needed to do some hands on in the cloud. how it works locally (minikube) i started on minikube, a tool that runs kubernetes on your local machine. the goal was to understand the concepts before touching any cloud resources. each tier runs in its own kubernetes deployment, which manages your pods and keeps them running.…