The Roadmap for Building a Production-Ready Full-Stack Web App in 5 Days with Minimal Resources

The Roadmap for Building a Production-Ready Full-Stack Web App in 5 Dyas with Minimal Resources

This 5-day roadmap walks you through building and shipping a production-ready web application using modern technologies, AI-enhanced development tools, and AWS cloud services—all while upskilling your full-stack engineering abilities.

Day 1 – Environment Setup(Estimated: 7 hours):

Set up the foundational tools and environments for your application:

Git (15 min):

Version control system for tracking and managing your codebase.

AWS (15 min):

Establish your cloud environment to deploy and manage backend services.

Docker (30 min):

Containerize your application for consistent development, testing, and deployment across environments;

Cursor IDE + Claude AI Coding Assistant (1 hour):

Install and integrate Cursor with Claude Sonnet 4. This combination serves as an advanced AI-powered IDE to accelerate your coding workflow. Use ChatGPT or Claude to walk through early use cases and address setup questions interactively.

AWS Amplify (2 hours):

Initialize an Amplify application with GitHub integration. Amplify streamlines frontend CI/CD, hosting, SSL setup, and routing—saving hours of manual configuration.

AWS SAM(Serverless Application Model) (3 hours):

Install and configure SAM CLI to manage backend infrastructure via IaC (CloudFormation). Set up your Lambda functions using Python in a Linux runtime and follow SAM tutorials for initial deployment workflows.

Day 2 – UI Development (Estimated: 8 hours):

Framework Initialization (30 min):

Create your UI project using React (JavaScript/HTML/CSS). Use Cursor’s setup presets for rapid scaffolding. If preferred, you can use alternative modern frameworks like Next.js or Vue.js.

Frontend Vibe Coding (7 hours):

Focus exclusively on UI feature development. Use Claude Code and Cursor to generate components based on your design. Avoid backend dependencies at this stage.

API Gateway Setup (30 min):

Configure AWS API Gateway to route frontend requests to backend Lambda endpoints, preparing the system for integration.

Day 3 – Backend Development (Estimated: 8 hours):

SAM Backend Configuration (1 hour):

Define Lambda function handlers using Python, connected to the API Gateway. Validate the end-to-end path from frontend request to backend response.

Lambda Function Setup (1 hour):

Develop and deploy a functional Lambda to process incoming requests and perform core logic.

Backend Development with AI (6 hours):

Use prompt-based development via Cursor + Claude to implement backend logic. Add “TODO” comments for future enhancements like caching or persistence.

Backend Framework(Optional):

Use a backend framework like FastAPI for complex routing or async handling.

Queuing System(Optional):

Allocate AWS SQS resource for queuing techniques between API Gateway and Lambda function to improve event handling reliability.

Day 4 – Data Storage Configuration (Estimated: 8 hours):

Database Setup (1 hour):

Provision a database via AWS SAM—use DynamoDB for fast and flexible NoSQL or mixed data. Ideal for MVPs due to low cost, speed, and schema flexibility.

Schema Design & Integration (5 hours):

Design data models and schemas. Prompt AI to help generate access patterns, then implement and test read/write operations in your backend.

Development Test (2 hour):

Test frontend and backend independently. Use logging tools and basic test scripts to verify end-to-end functionality.

RDS Relational Database(Optional):

Use if relational modeling is needed later.

S3 File Storage(Optional):

Useful for storing files like resumes, images, PDFs.

High Availability System(Optional):

Caching and high availability systems like Kafka or Redis are not essential for the MVP stage. But drill in to setup and integrate if interested.

Day 5 – Deployment, Monitoring, and Final Test (Estimated: 7 hours):

Frontend Deployment (1 hour):

Deploy UI through AWS Amplify. Connect to GitHub, configure environment variables, and publish to a public URL. Amplify includes build previews, smoke tests, and free-tier hosting.

Backend Deployment (3 hour):

Use SAM to containerize your application (optionally using ECS for service orchestration). Define all backend resources in template.yaml and deploy via CloudFormation.

Cloudwatch Prod Test (3 hours):

Monitor live logs and events using AWS CloudWatch. Conduct system-level testing to ensure requests flow from frontend to backend and database as expected.

System Monitoring(Optional):

Use monitor systems like Grafana or AWS X-Ray for detailed application performance monitoring and distributed tracing.

Resources:

Git: https://git-scm.com/

AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/

Docker: https://www.docker.com/

Cursor: https://cursor.com/en

Cursor Rules: https://github.com/PatrickJS/awesome-cursorrules

Claude Code: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code

Claude Sonnet 4: https://www.anthropic.com/claude/sonnet

React: https://react.dev/

NextJS: https://nextjs.org/