Architecture

In order to optimize on cost, the proposed architecture above makes the course hosting fees predictable. In fact, the course hosting platform itself is nothing but a statically generated website, which should cost penies on the dollar to host, and at the same time provide a snappy user experience for the site visitors. The statically generated website places the burden of scale and bandwith costs directly to the APIs it consumes. As long as the pricing of the APIs, are set in fixed increments, the technology cost of the course video platform will be predictable.

In addition to the third party APIs which will used the following features:

• "/video"
• "/users"
• "/comments"
• "/payments"

One additional API will be needed to manage content on the course platform such as:

• User status (enrolled, paid customer, active, list of purchased courses or other material)
• User access (granting access)
• User communications (email subscriptions, direct emails, feedback)
• Text content
• Announcements
• Promotions

For that, the following tools or services can come handy:

• Headless CMS
• Wordpress
• Ruby on Rails
• Django

Finally, the statically generated website could be hosted using the following tools or services:

• Netlify
• Vercel