Tracing One Request Through Every Layer
~12 min read
A step-by-step walkthrough of exactly what happens between a user clicking a link and seeing the resulting page.
Tracing One Request Through Every Layer is a Pro topic
Sign in, then upgrade to Pro or Power to unlock this topic and the full AWS curriculum.
Key points
- •DNS (Route 53 Alias) → CDN (CloudFront) → Load Balancer (ALB) → Compute (EC2/ASG) → Data (RDS/S3)
- •Cached static content short-circuits at the CDN layer, never reaching the origin at all
- •Only healthy instances (per ALB target group health checks) ever receive traffic
- •Credentials are retrieved at runtime from Secrets Manager, never hardcoded in application code