Regional Gardens Ltd is a company that runs a number of related gardening enterprises. It has a large display garden that it opens for public inspection a number of times a year. These enterprises include the Regional Gardens Nursery which sells plants and garden supplies to the public, and Regional Garden Planners which provides garden advice, design and consultancy services.
Regional Gardens has engaged you as a consultant to advise them on the use of Cloud Computing in their daily operations and they have asked you to prepare a report for their Board that looks at the following aspects of the proposal:
The first step of the board’s plan is to move the Regional Gardens website and associated web services into the cloud. However, they want some further information on:
Whether an IaaS or a PaaS model would be more appropriate for their web services and the advantages and disadvantages of each model in this case (15 marks).
The board also want their web services architecture to be more resilient than in the past, and they want you to recommend an architecture to achieve resiliency (15 marks).
In keeping with the their new security policy, the Board want to keep all client and transaction data in the Bathurst Data Centre and not in the cloud. This means that clients accessing the Regional Gardens web site and web services will need to have any data that they upload stored in the Bathurst Data Centre.
Describe to the Board how you would arrange to have client data that is uploaded to the Regional Gardens web site and services stored in the Bathurst Data Centre. (15 marks)
Describe the advantages and disadvantages of this approach. (15 marks)
Regional Gardens want to ensure that all their staff have the ability to access office automation, such as email, word processing and spreadsheet capabilities, as well as online storage for their files, whether they are in the office, at home, or deployed on a customer’s site in the field. The Regional Gardens board is very concerned to learn about the critical issues, other than cost, that may affect the supply of Cloud based office automation to their staff. You will need to prepare a report on the best way to provide office automation for Regional Gardens. Your report should:
Provide Regional Gardens with TWO different approaches to providing office automation to their staff; (10 marks)
Outline the major benefits and issues with each approach; (5 marks)
Provide a summary of your advice to this company along with your recommendation about which option to choose. (5 marks)
The garden design unit uses the DynaScape software suite, which is installed locally on their laptops, to design gardens and landscapes for their clients. The design staff often spend long periods at a clients property while collecting data and designing. The Board are uncertain if they should retain local installations of this software or subscribe to the SaaS version of DynaScape. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches. (20 marks)
Overall and from a general perspective, the Regional Gardens website and associated web services can be moved, build, deployed, and run in the cloud, say, at public Cloud Service Provider (CSP) such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), as an example.
AWS guarantees resiliency for all their cloud service offerings. AWS best suits for Regional Gardens' Cloud Computing daily operations. Regional Gardens can learn to build their websites, web applications, and associated web services all, on AWS. AWS facilitates Regional Gardens to build a High-Availability (HA) production website, even if disasters strike. The business or company can host their static website or a simple marketing website on AWS if they have one. This can be achieved using Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for storage, Amazon Route 53 for Domain Name System (DNS) services, and Amazon CloudFront for Content Delivery Network (CDN) services. With this, they can develop, deploy, and manage static websites on AWS.
On the other hand, they can use AWS serverless multi-tier architecture strategy for designing multi-tiered architectures, if at all they have such architectures or complex web applications or web services, for popular patterns like microservices, mobile back ends, and public websites. They could even go for serverless web applications.
From the designing and programming the front-end of their websites, web applications, or associated web services, they could use Java, Python, Node-js, Ruby, PHP, NET, etc., Software Development Kits (SDKs) simplifying by using AWS services for their website or web application with an Application Programming Interface (API) that is tailored to their programming language or platform.
To register their website's domain name, they could do so with Amazon Route 53 service. AWS can be used to scale up the customer's web application so everyone can use it. All these can be done for a low cost, billed on a Pay-As-You-Go pricing model for most of the AWS offerings, paying only for what is being used. They can have a flexible infrastructure on AWS. They get complete control of their cloud resources. They can choose from many virtual servers for their computing power and capabilities, such as Virtual Machines (VMs) or Instances, as called in the AWS platform. These are basically for web servers and other computing requirements. They could use either a single instance or a large cluster of servers. They could even use specialized servers that are optimized for lots of disk space, lots of memory such as RAM, or for special graphics chips such as Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). They can choose the Operating System (OS) for their servers, programming languages, and tools that are right for them, for their business requirements, and use cases. They could use any database such as MongoDB, CouchDB, Casandra, Oracle, Microsoft SQL, MySQL, etc., for storage purposes. They could even use Amazon's fully-managed database service called Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), or AWS, NoSQL database service called Amazon DynamoDB, which provides fast single-digit latency for their data.
For all the services mentioned above, Amazon takes care of the daily operations, automatically. All these cloud services are available to this customer, right away. This would shorten Regional Gardens' project timeline and they get to market globally, faster. They can experiment with their architecture and the provided technologies without affecting their production environment. They also get access to different and vast amounts of and AWS resources, services, solutions, and products.
AWS provides Auto-Scaling feature which is their fully managed services, using which the customer's applications can grow and shrink, elastically with demand, enabling the customer's servers to handle huge increases in the web traffic, in case, their website or web application becomes popular and goes viral. Also, the feature can automatically turn off AWS resources when they are not being and used and are not needed, i.e., say, when the customer's users are sleeping.
AWS can also do infrastructure provisioning for this customer, where the customer just needs to point to their Git repository or upload their code, so AWS handles the rest, without any additional cost.
Regional Gardens can use:
* Amazon Lightsail service to easily launch and manage a virtual
private server. The service has everything included in it the
customer would require for jumpstarting their project- a VM,
SSD-based storage, data transfer, DNS management, and a static
IP.
* Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service for virtual
application servers or "instances", for hosting website or web
application.
* The highly available and scalable Amazon Route 53 cloud DNS web
service.
* Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) service achieving greater
levels of fault tolerance distributing web requests to the EC2
instances that are used for running their application.
* Amazon Auto Scaling service to make sure their application is
optimized for availability and resiliency. They can set a minimum
number of available application servers and either add or remove
application servers as per demand on their website changes.
* Amazon RDS service for managed relational database environments,
which are also called "instances", in the AWS cloud. The service
provides them six widely used database engines such as Amazon
Aurora, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and
MariaDB.
* Amazon S3 service for secure, durable, and highly-scalable cloud
storage for the objects such as HTML pages, CSS files, images,
videos, and JavaScript making up their website.
Or they could use AWS Elastic Beanstalk service, which is a fully managed service of AWS for handling the details of their website, web application, and associated web services hosting environment, that includes provisioning AWS resources such as EC2 application servers, and configuring load balancing, scaling, and monitoring.
All the services mentioned are resilient as they are fully managed by AWS.
Regional Gardens Ltd is a company that runs a number of related gardening enterprises. It has a large display garden that it opens for public inspection a number of times a year. These enterprises include the Regional Gardens Nursery which sells plants and garden supplies to the public, and Regional Garden Planners which provides garden advice, design and consultancy services. Regional Gardens Ltd has a small data center at its main site in Bathurst where the company’s servers and data...
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