Enterprise Cloud Computing with the AWS environment Level 7

ASSIGNMENT:
Research Portfolio and Justification of Cloud Based Design Artefact

1. Overview

This document forms the specification for your coursework in this module. This
coursework will address and assess Learning Outcomes 1 to 4 as indicated in the Module
Descriptor. These are also shown below.
1. Research and evaluate issues which affects cloud adoption within an
organization.
Analysis and Enquiry
2. Investigate and critically evaluate how cloud services can be used to
enhance an organizations infrastructure.
Learning
Analysis, Enquiry and Knowledge & Understanding
Outcome
3. Implement a cloud based infrastructure for a given scenario which
s
will aid a SME to improve its business performance
Application
4. Critically evaluate new approaches in cloud services and evaluate the
benefits and the risks for within a commercial environment
Problem Solving, Enquiry, Reflection and Communication

2. Specific Requirements

2.1 This coursework is weighted at 100% of the overall module mark and there is no other
coursework that you are required to complete for this module.

Assignment point 1 is a research portfolio (2000 words) weighted at 30% addressing

Learning Outcomes 1 and 2.
Assignment point 2 is a justification of cloud based design artefact for an enterprise
design is weighted at 70% addressing Learning Outcome 3 and 4.
Assignment point 2 will be evaluated through a documentation (1000 words) and a
presentation (15 minutes).

2.2 The assessment should be targeting an established company in Sri Lanka which is
currently hoping to continue expanding its IT infrastructure to the cloud.

To help this process, the company senior management has decided to,
(1) hire an expert in the area of cloud digital transformation.
(2) leverage AWS as the key cloud platform while experimenting its new offerings.

This assessment assumes that you are the expert that the company is going to hire to build
their next generation cloud IT infrastructure.

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Enterprise Cloud Computing with the AWS environment Level 7

2.3 If an element of the assessment is not clear then please speak to your lecturer.

2.4 The documents should be in accordance with the sections 3 and 4.

2.5 You must use Harvard referencing.

2.6 A plus or minus 10% variation on the word count will be accepted.

2.7 This coursework should be completed and submitted as an individual piece of work. In
other words, it is not group work. You should be aware of the rules on academic
misconduct. These rules are very clear. The Faculty takes a strict line in enforcing them.
It is important that you understand the regulations as the penalties for infringement
can be very serious including: module failure; grade point zero; downgrading your
degree classification; award failure; expulsion from the University.

3. Assessment Requirements/ Deliverables

3.1 A sample Case study: BookingSL (Pvt) Ltd

Company Background
BookingSL is a Sri Lankan one-stop booking web site, which was launched in 2000 to
cater many booking domains in Sri Lanka such as hotels, events, working spaces, air
tickets, movie tickets, etc. Since its inception, the booking site has gone through many IT
infrastructure changes to improve its performance, cost, security, reliability and the day-
to-day operations. Until now, the website has been hosted on the company premises and
running on a small cluster. The application is written on a pure Java platform adhering to
the traditional monolithic architecture patterns. The cluster consists of two Java virtual
server instances, a software load balancer and a MySQL database hosted on the same
server. Being the first booking web site in Sri Lanka, it slowly became popular among
masses though it had many reliability issues in the current architecture. However, due to
its unreliable nature of the application deployment, the company senior management have
been receiving endless complaints from the public. That prompted them to think seriously
to revamp the application from the software and the deployment perspective. Moving to a
cloud environment is one key aspect that they are seriously looking at.

Some of the current IT architectural issues are complexities are listed below:

 The application was developed adhering to a Monolithic architecture. There are

multiple day-to-day downtimes of the whole application, due to this architecture
limitation.

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 Currently there are two Java instances running (Active-Active mode) on a single on-
premise server, which is load balanced by an open source software balancer. The
database (MySQL) also runs on the same server without any fail-over. No automatic
scale-out mechanisms.
 The security of the application is maintained by HTTPS (transport level) and the user
authentication happens via external identity brokers such as Google and Facebook. The
company has purchased a SSL certificate from Verisign and installed it in the server
itself. The encryption does happen at transit but not at rest (on Database).
 The external APIs are channeled through the application server itself and there is no
proper API management available.
 All the images related to bookings are stored in the physical server itself. There is no
image/ content caching happens.
 The manual backup procedures are scheduled for the application and the database daily
basis at midnight. During this time, the users are not able to access the system. There is
no Disaster Recovery (DR) procedure other than the manual backups being taken.
There is not remote DR site either.
 During festive seasons, the existing servers cannot handle the request load and goes
through many server downtimes. A few times, the IT staff tried add more physical
servers to the existing architecture but was not successful due to its configuration
complexities.
 All the transactions do happen synchronously. No asynchronous queues or any other
decoupled architectures.

3.2 In this assessment you are being asked to look at the current infrastructure and consider
making suggestions on changing this towards a Cloud based infrastructure.
 Assignment Point 1 (2000 words) at 30% –
How the latest AWS services and Cloud Design Patterns can be leveraged to move to a
more robust cloud architecture (Using a re-engineered approach).
 Assignment point 2
Documentation (1000 words) at 50% -
The current IT infrastructure and its issues (Refer “Company Background” section for a
sample case study). How these identified issues can be resolved with the help of a AWS
Cloud infrastructure (Using a Lift and Shift approach)
Presentation (15 minutes) at 20% –
You will also need to give a presentation on your work in the class. In this you will be
giving a summary of your work and your findings.

3.3 Meetings

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Enterprise Cloud Computing with the AWS environment Level 7
You are required to schedule the relevant meetings, with the selected company during
the course duration. The company selection should be done by yourself at the start of
the course and need to get the lecturer approval to go ahead with the assessment.

4. Assessment Scheme
Section Marks Marks
Available Awarded

Assignment Point 1 (Research Component) 30% of the marks

Discussion on the latest AWS services/ Cloud concepts that you /30
can leverage to re-engineer the proposed architecture, which is
discussed under Assignment Point 2
Hint: Some of the latest AWS services / cloud concepts are
Container Architectures, Microservices Pattern Designs,
Serverless Architectures, NoSQL Databases, Database and
Session Caching, etc.

Assignment Point 2 (Documentation of the Company) 50% of the marks

Good defined analysis to the issues presented with the current /10
infrastructure (Refer “Company Background” section for a
sample case study)

Discussion of the AWS technologies that can be leveraged to /15

overcome the current challenges by deploying many cloud level
features (Virtual Machines, Elastic Load Balancers, Block
Storages, Cloud Databases, Security Groups, Virtual Private
Networks, etc)
Hint: Here, the answer should be able to propose AWS
technologies with minimal changes to the current application code
base (The “Lift and Shift” approach).

Clear design of an example topology using the AWS /10

environment.
Hint: The AWS solution architecture dragram (Use draw.io)
encompassing all the selected AWS services should be shown.

Discuss the benefits and risks of moving the infrastructure to the /10
Cloud

Report is professional formatted with sections, introduction, /5

findings, references and conclusion

Assignment Point 2 (Presentation) 20% of the marks

Clear presentation in terms of the slides which are clear to read /5

and follow in a logical sequence

The final solution is justified and clear during the presentation /5

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Presentation is within the allocated 15 minutes and not rushed /5

Good clear technical answers to questions /5

Total: /100 /100

5. Submission Guidelines

5.1 The primary method of submission is via LMS.

5.2 You should submit a PDF copy of your paper by the submission deadline. You may be
asked to submit other file formats. In this case your lecturer will inform you accordingly.
5.3 PDF documents should not be password protected or have restricted permissions –
specifically, they should allow modifications (for annotations and comments).
5.4 You are advised to keep copies of all your work for your own records.