Udacity Project - Design for Performance and Scalability

This is one of the project in Udacity AWS Cloud Architect Nanodegree. Resources and instructions can be found here.

Project Overview

In this project, I have:

Designed, provisioned, and monitored infrastructure in AWS using industry-standard and open source tools.
Practiced the skills I have learned throughout the course to optimize infrastructure for cost and performance.
Used Terraform to provision and configure AWS services in a global configuration.

Exercise: Contains the terraform code to create EC2 instances & deploy lamda function in AWS.
screenshots: This folder contains all the screenshots taken at time of doing project.
Udacity_Diagram_1.pdf: Contains a cost-effective AWS infrastructure architecture for a new social media application development project for 50,000 single-region users.
Udacity_Diagram_2.pdf: Contains a SERVERLESS architecture schematic for a new application development project.
Initial_Cost_Estimate.csv: Cost estimated using AWS Pricing Calculator for the architecture to run in AWS created in Udacity_Diagram_1.pdf.
- Targeted a monthly estimate between $8,000-$10,000.
Reduced_Cost_Estimate.csv: Cost estimated using AWS Pricing Calculator for the architecture to run in AWS created in Udacity_Diagram_1.pdf.
- Targeted a monthly estimate to a maximum of $6,500.
Increased_Cost Estimate.csv: Cost estimated using AWS Pricing Calculator for the architecture to run in AWS created in Udacity_Diagram_1.pdf.
- Targeted a monthly estimate to a maximum of $20,000.

Below is the list of changes and reasons for the solution:

Change: Change the back up storage type to Magnetic HDD (whose storage amount is set to 3000 GB)
- Reason: The reason is that we have 2 DB instances running with 90% utilizaiton and for a 50,000 region users, 3000 GB backup storage should suffice.

Below is the list of changes and reasons for the solution:

Change: Increased the number of in-use IPv4 Addresses.
- Reason: This will provide more IPv4 addresses for more EC2 instances, which supports high availability for the application. Even if Northern Virginia region is completely down, application will be up and running in Ohio region.
Change: Increase the number of EC2 instances to 4 to increase the availabilty of the applications. Also include EBS storage amount for to increase the reliability and resiliency of the applications.
- Reason: This change ensure that the applications meet AWS' standard requirements for high availability, durability and resilency.
Change: Add AWS Shield.
- Reason: As we use Elastic Load Blancers, AWS Cloud Front and public-facing applications with EC2 instnaces, having AWS Shield will help us protect the applications and their resources.
Change: Add AWS WAF.
- Reason: Add an extra layer of protection on the public facing web application. This prevents common attacks like SQL Injection, XSS, Path Traversal, etc.