Frontend Security & Observability — Full Course Syllabus

Securing and monitoring production frontend applications — CSP, XSS prevention, RUM, and release strategy.

1. 1. Synthetic monitoring for frontend flowsUsing scripted synthetic checks to monitor critical frontend flows and availability.
2. 2. Subresource Integrity (SRI)Using SRI attributes to ensure external script/style integrity on the client.
3. 3. Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) basics for frontendsUnderstanding browser CORS constraints and the frontend implications for calling APIs.
4. 4. Secure default headersSetting up recommended HTTP headers (Referrer-Policy, X-Frame-Options basics) for frontend apps.
5. 5. Observability: client-side loggingInstrumenting structured logs from the browser and shipping them to centralized collectors.
6. 6. Real User Monitoring (RUM) ObservabilityCollecting client-side performance and error metrics from real user sessions.
7. 7. Client-side metrics collectionExposing and recording custom frontend metrics (counters, histograms) for dashboards and alerts.
8. 8. Error aggregation and alertingGrouping, deduplicating, and alerting on frontend errors with severity rules.
9. 9. Performance budgetsDefining numeric limits for performance metrics and enforcing them in CI and monitoring.
10. 10. Content Security Policy (CSP)Configuring CSP headers/metadata to restrict sources of scripts, styles, and other resources.
11. 11. Secure cookie usage for session cookiesUsing HttpOnly, Secure, SameSite attributes appropriately for session cookies in frontends.
12. 12. Token storage patternsTradeoffs between storing tokens in cookies, localStorage, and in-memory for JavaScript apps.
13. 13. Input sanitization & XSS preventionTechniques to prevent cross-site scripting by sanitizing or escaping user-controlled content.
14. 14. Supply-chain security for frontend dependenciesMitigations like lockfiles, dependency pinning, and automated vulnerability scanning.
15. 15. CI secrets management for frontend pipelinesSecurely injecting and using secrets in CI/CD pipelines for frontend builds and deployments.
16. 16. Observability: source-map handlingBest practices for generating, uploading, and protecting source maps for error reporting.
17. 17. Client-side Authentication Session FlowsClient-side flows for auth (redirects, silent renew, token refresh) without backend auth design.
18. 18. Static asset versioning and cache invalidationFingerprinting, content hashing, and cache-control strategies for serving frontend assets correctly.
19. 19. CDN caching strategies for SPAsConcepts for caching HTML/JS/CSS at CDNs including stale-while-revalidate and edge TTL policies (provider-agnostic).
20. 20. Telemetry privacy and data minimizationPrinciples for collecting observability data while minimizing PII exposure from clients.
21. 21. Bundle analysis and splittingTools and techniques to analyze bundle size and implement code-splitting per route or component.
22. 22. Building a deployable artifactCreating a deterministic build or bundle that can be deployed to a hosting target.
23. 23. Environment-specific deployment configurationManaging separate configurations for development, staging, and production deployments.
24. 24. Basic observability (logs and errors)Adding logging and simple error reporting to capture runtime issues in production.
25. 25. Secrets managementKeeping secrets out of source control and using secure storage for API keys and credentials.
26. 26. Chaos testing for frontendsIntroducing controlled failures (network faults, metric delays) to verify frontend resilience and fallbacks.
27. 27. Monitoring frontend SLIs/SLOs for user-facing availability and latencyDefining service-level indicators and objectives for frontend availability and latency from the user's perspective.
28. 28. Edge-side compositionAssembling microfrontends at CDN/edge level for performance and routing benefits (conceptual patterns, not provider internals).
29. 29. Observability: distributed tracing for frontendsAdding trace correlation IDs and spans for frontend requests to trace user flows across services.
30. 30. Frontend release strategies (canary / blue-green)Techniques for progressively releasing frontend changes to subsets of users to limit impact.
31. 31. XSS basics and safe string handlingBasic cross-site scripting concepts and safe handling of untrusted strings in web contexts (conceptual, not framework-specific).