Large Scale Data Engineering EMATM0051

Summary

This coursework is divided into two parts:

Part 1: A written task (only) related to the knowledge gained in the AWS Academy Cloud

Foundations course (weeks 1-7).

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Part 2: A combined practical and written activity architecting a scaling application on the Cloud, where you will be required to use knowledge gained and a little further research to implement the scaling infrastructure, followed by a report that will focus on your experience in the practical activity

together with knowledge gained in the entire LSDE course.

Weighting : This assessment is worth 100% of your total unit 20 credits.

Pre-requisites:

• You must have completed the AWS Academy Cloud Foundations course set in weeks 1-8

• You will require an AWS Academy Lab account for the practical activity. You should receive an invite when this document is released. Please contact the LSDE Unit Director if you have no invitation email or are having issues with the registration.

• A Secure Shell (SSH) client, such as MacOS Terminal or PuTTy on Windows, for server admin.

Submission :

Via the LSDE BlackBoard coursework assessment page, submit one .pdf file (named ‘your_username.pdf, e.g. tl18303.pdf), containing:

• A report (‘report.pdf’) in PDF format containing:

o Part 1

o Part 2

o Your AWS Academy account credentials (username, password)

In this document we provide a detailed explanation of the tasks and the approach to marking.

Task 1: (25%)

Write a maximum of 1000 words (minimum: 600) debating the statement:

“Transform the retail industry by leveraging cloud technology”. You could know some background information via this link: https://anywhere.tech/cloud-services/cloud-computing-in-retail/ Include your own descriptions of the following:

• At least 5 AWS features or services introduced in the Cloud Foundations course that make cloud service advantageous for retail industry.

• At least 3 different scenarios where the cloud service may have challenges for transforming  retail industry.

Task 2: Scaling the WordPress Application (75%)

Overview

WordPress is by far the most popular open-source software for hosting online blogs and small-scale  websites. It is a PHP application, backed by a MySQL database (NOTE: you are NOT expected to understand or modify the source code in any way).

WordPress includes a password-secured browser admin interface that enables blog posts and other content to be created, management of users, review of blog metrics, installation of extensions (known as ‘plugins’), and so on.

WordPress is typically installed on a single EC2 server, but as we saw in the Cloud Foundations course, a single server has limitations in availability, scalability, performance, etc. This can affect the speed of response (latency) and thus performance and cost (see this article ).

Your task will be to take a default, minimal installation of WordPress and implement a resilient, highly available, scalable, cost effective and secure architecture for it on AWS. This will include performing load testing on your application to demonstrate improved performance under stress.

You will be required to initially set up and test the application, using instructions given with the zip download file. You will then need to identify how to scale and improve the application architecture, based on principles learned in the CF course. Finally, you will write a report covering this process, along with some extra material.