Why I Built This Most Kubernetes tutorials stop at kubectl apply -f deployment.yaml . They don't show you how a VPC is laid out, why you need two availability zones, what IAM roles EKS nodes actually need, or how to debug a live failure using Prometheus metrics. I wanted to build something that forced me to make every decision a senior DevOps engineer would make on a real project. So I built a food delivery platform — four independent microservices, a React frontend, full Terraform infrastructure on AWS, a GitHub Actions pipeline, and a Grafana dashboard — and recorded the whole thing. This is what I learned. How It Works The Application Layer Four FastAPI microservices, each completely independent with its own SQLite database: user-service (port 8001): Registration, JWT login, user profiles. Seeds 3 users on startup. restaurant-service (port 8002): Restaurant listing + full menus. Seeds 5 restaurants with 10 menu items each — real food names, USD prices. order-service (port 8003): Order placement.…