Postgraduate & Executive Programmes
Postgraduate Diploma in Software Engineering & Cloud Architecture
Enterprise architecture, distributed systems and AWS/Microsoft cloud certification — 18 weeks, capstone-defended
What you'll learn
check_circleDesign microservices, event-driven and domain-driven architectures for real systems
check_circleDeploy and secure production workloads on AWS and Microsoft Azure
check_circleSit the AWS Solutions Architect Associate and Azure Administrator (AZ-104) exams with structured prep
check_circlePractise systems-design interviews the way FAANG-style employers run them
check_circleWrite a postgraduate-standard technical report and defend a capstone project
Course syllabus
1. Week 1: Advanced OOP & Functional Programming Paradigms
5 lessons
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Push past basic classes into composition, immutability and functional-style patterns you will reuse in every language you touch.
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Composition Over Inheritance & SOLID Principles Revisited
65m Free preview
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Immutability, Pure Functions & Referential Transparency
65m Free preview
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Functional Programming Patterns — Map/Filter/Reduce, Currying & Monads
65m
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Generics, Interfaces & Advanced Type Systems
65m
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Lab: Refactoring a Legacy OOP Codebase into Clean, Composable Code
65m
2. Week 2: Data Structures, Algorithms & Complexity Analysis
5 lessons
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Big-O thinking, the structures behind real systems, and why the right data structure is half of good architecture.
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Big-O Notation & Algorithmic Complexity Analysis
65m
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Core Data Structures — Trees, Heaps, Graphs & Hash Maps in Practice
65m
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Sorting & Searching Algorithms at Scale
65m
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Graph Algorithms — Traversal, Shortest Path & Real-World Applications
65m
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Lab: Choosing & Implementing the Right Data Structure for a Production Problem
65m
3. Week 3: Software Design Patterns & Clean Architecture
5 lessons
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The classic Gang-of-Four patterns and layered/clean architecture applied to a real Laravel/Node codebase.
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Creational Patterns — Factory, Builder & Singleton in Modern Codebases
65m
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Structural & Behavioural Patterns — Adapter, Decorator, Strategy & Observer
65m
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Clean Architecture & Layered Design — Separating Concerns That Actually Stay Separated
65m
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Dependency Injection & Inversion of Control in Laravel and Node.js
65m
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Lab: Applying Clean Architecture to a Real Laravel/Node Service
65m
4. Week 4: Microservices Architecture & Domain-Driven Design
5 lessons
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Splitting a monolith by business domain, bounded contexts, and where microservices actually pay off.
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Domain-Driven Design — Bounded Contexts, Aggregates & Ubiquitous Language
65m
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Monolith vs Microservices — When Splitting Actually Pays Off
55m
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Service Boundaries, Data Ownership & the Strangler Fig Pattern
65m
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Inter-Service Communication — Synchronous vs Asynchronous Trade-offs
65m
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Lab: Decomposing a Monolith into Two Bounded-Context Services
65m
5. Week 5: Advanced API Design — REST, GraphQL & gRPC
5 lessons
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Designing APIs that age well: versioning, pagination, GraphQL schemas and high-performance gRPC.
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REST API Design That Ages Well — Versioning, Pagination & HATEOAS
65m
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GraphQL — Schemas, Resolvers & Solving Over-fetching
65m
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gRPC & Protocol Buffers for High-Performance Services
65m
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API Security, Rate Limiting & Documentation (OpenAPI/Swagger)
65m
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Lab: Building the Same Endpoint Three Ways — REST, GraphQL & gRPC
65m
6. Week 6: Distributed Systems & Event-Driven Architecture
5 lessons
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Message queues, event sourcing and eventual consistency using Kafka and RabbitMQ.
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Distributed Systems Fundamentals — CAP Theorem & Eventual Consistency
65m
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Message Queues in Practice — RabbitMQ Patterns & Delivery Guarantees
65m
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Event Streaming with Apache Kafka — Topics, Partitions & Consumer Groups
65m
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Event Sourcing & CQRS — Rebuilding State from an Event Log
65m
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Lab: Building an Event-Driven Order Pipeline with Kafka/RabbitMQ
65m
7. Week 7: Cloud Fundamentals — AWS Core Services
5 lessons
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EC2, S3, IAM and VPC — the four services almost every AWS architecture is built from.
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Amazon EC2 — Instance Types, Pricing Models & Auto Scaling
60m
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Amazon S3 — Storage Classes, Lifecycle Rules & Static Hosting
65m
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AWS IAM — Users, Roles, Policies & the Principle of Least Privilege
65m
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Amazon VPC — Subnets, Route Tables & Security Groups
65m
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Lab: Provisioning a Secure Three-Tier Architecture on AWS
65m
8. Week 8: AWS Solutions Architect Associate — Exam Preparation
5 lessons
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Structured review and practice exams aligned to the official AWS Solutions Architect Associate blueprint.
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Domain Review: Designing Resilient Architectures (Multi-AZ, RDS/Aurora, Backup & DR)
65m
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Domain Review: Designing High-Performing Architectures (Auto Scaling, Caching, ELB)
65m
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Domain Review: Designing Secure Architectures (IAM Policies, Encryption, SGs vs NACLs)
65m
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Domain Review: Designing Cost-Optimised Architectures (Reserved/Spot, S3 Tiering)
65m
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Full-Length SAA-C03 Practice Exam & Exam-Day Strategy
60m
9. Week 9: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) & Core Services
5 lessons
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Azure's core services and the AZ-900 syllabus, for engineers who need to work across both major clouds.
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Cloud Concepts — Shared Responsibility Model & IaaS/PaaS/SaaS
65m
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Core Azure Services — Compute, Storage, Networking & Identity
65m
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Azure Pricing, Support Plans & Service-Level Agreements
65m
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Touring the Azure Portal & Resource Manager (ARM)
65m
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AZ-900 Practice Exam & Review
55m
10. Week 10: Azure Administrator (AZ-104) — Exam Preparation
5 lessons
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Identity, storage, compute and networking in Azure, mapped directly to the AZ-104 exam objectives.
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Identity & Governance — Azure AD & Role-Based Access Control
65m
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Azure Storage — Accounts, Blobs & Files
65m
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Azure Compute — Virtual Machines, App Service & Containers
65m
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Azure Virtual Networking — VNets, Load Balancing & DNS
65m
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Monitoring, Backup & AZ-104 Practice Exam
70m
11. Week 11: Container Orchestration at Scale — Kubernetes & Helm
5 lessons
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Running and managing containerised workloads in production with Kubernetes and Helm charts.
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Kubernetes Architecture — Pods, Nodes & the Control Plane
65m
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Deployments, Services & Scaling Workloads
65m
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Ingress, ConfigMaps & Secrets Management
65m
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Packaging Applications with Helm Charts
65m
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Lab: Deploying and Scaling a Multi-Service App on Kubernetes
65m
12. Week 12: Site Reliability Engineering & Observability
5 lessons
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SLOs/SLIs, on-call practice, and building dashboards and alerts that catch problems before users do.
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SRE Fundamentals — SLIs, SLOs & Error Budgets
65m
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Observability — Metrics, Logs & Distributed Tracing
65m
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Building Dashboards & Alerting That Catch Problems Early (Prometheus/Grafana)
65m
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On-Call Practice, Incident Response & Postmortems
55m
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Lab: Instrumenting a Service for Full Observability
65m
13. Week 13: Software Testing — TDD, BDD & Automated QA
5 lessons
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Test-driven and behaviour-driven development, and building a CI pipeline that actually blocks bad code.
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Test-Driven Development — Red, Green, Refactor
65m
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Behaviour-Driven Development & Writing Specs Stakeholders Understand
65m
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Unit, Integration & End-to-End Testing Strategy
65m
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Building a CI Pipeline That Actually Blocks Bad Code
65m
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Lab: TDD a Feature from Scratch with a Full CI Gate
65m
14. Week 14: Security Engineering & DevSecOps
5 lessons
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Threat modelling, dependency scanning and building security checks into the deployment pipeline itself.
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Threat Modelling for Software Systems (STRIDE)
65m
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Dependency Scanning & Software Composition Analysis
65m
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Secrets Management & Secure CI/CD Pipelines
65m
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Shifting Security Left — DevSecOps in Practice
65m
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Lab: Building Security Gates into a Deployment Pipeline
65m
15. Week 15: Systems Design Interviews & Architecture Case Studies
5 lessons
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Whiteboard-style systems design practice using real case studies from scaled consumer and fintech apps.
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Systems Design Interview Framework — Requirements to Architecture
65m
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Case Study: Designing a URL Shortener / Rate Limiter at Scale
65m
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Case Study: Designing a Scaled Fintech Payments Ledger
65m
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Case Study: Designing a Feed/Notification System for Millions of Users
65m
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Lab: Whiteboard a Systems Design Problem End-to-End
55m
16. Week 16: Research Methods in Computing & Technical Writing
5 lessons
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How to scope, structure and write a technical report to the standard a postgraduate panel expects.
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Scoping a Postgraduate-Level Technical Research Question
55m
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Literature Review & Evaluating Technical Sources
55m
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Structuring a Technical Report to Academic/Industry Standard
55m
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Technical Writing Craft — Clarity, Diagrams & Evidence
55m
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Lab: Draft the Introduction & Methodology of Your Capstone Report
55m
17. Week 17: Industry Mentorship & Applied Team Project
5 lessons
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A mentored team build of an enterprise-style cloud-native application, reviewed like a real engineering team.
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Forming a Team & Scoping an Enterprise-Style Cloud-Native Build
55m
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Architecture Review with Your Mentor — Feedback Round One
55m
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Sprint Execution — Building the Core Service
65m
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Sprint Execution — Integration, Testing & Deployment
65m
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Mentor Review & Retrospective
60m
18. Week 18: Capstone — Report, Defence & Career Placement
5 lessons
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Submit the written capstone report and defend it live, then move into remote/hybrid job-placement support.
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Finalising the Written Capstone Report
55m
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Preparing Your Capstone Defence Presentation
55m
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Capstone Defence — Live Panel Review
55m
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Portfolio & CV Positioning for Cloud/Backend Roles
55m
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Job Placement Support — Remote & Hybrid Opportunities
60m
Requirements
- Completion of a Certificate/Diploma-level web development track (ours or equivalent), or demonstrable working knowledge of a backend language and SQL
- A computer capable of running Docker and a code editor
- Comfort reading and writing intermediate-level code
About this course
For developers ready to design systems, not just write code.
This track picks up where Full Stack Development stops. You will design microservices and event-driven systems the way senior engineers do at scale, then take that architecture into AWS and Microsoft Azure — building toward the AWS Solutions Architect Associate and Microsoft Azure Administrator (AZ-104) certification exams.
The final six weeks are research-and-practice: a mentored team project, a technical report written to postgraduate academic standard, and a public capstone defence — the same format used for university dissertation panels, so the portfolio you leave with is built to be recognised, not just admired.
₦350,000
person Prof. Ngozi Umeh
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Live Zoom classes · recordings to rewatch · certificate on completion
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