Cloud Computing Foundation: Reporting Guidelines

University of Amsterdam

1. Introduction

In this tutorial assignment, you will explore the fundamentals of cloud computing using AWS Academy resources. The goal is to gain an understanding of cloud concepts, services, and best practices, as well as hands-on experience with cloud service provisioning and management.

The objectives of this assignment are to:

• Understand the foundations of cloud computing
• Learn from the best industry practices in cloud services provisioning and management
• Get practical experience working with cloud services using AWS as an example of a cloud service provider

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1.1 Learning Materials and Learning Platform

This assignment is based on educational and computing resources provided by the AWS Academy in their introductory course Cloud Computing Foundation on the AWS Academy Canvas platform. It contains lessons, learning materials, and a sandbox lab platform.

• Students are provided with free accounts on the Canvas platform along with AWS educational lab sandbox access for course lessons and individual projects.
• Each student is granted $100 USD credits for the duration of the course.
  • Note: Students are advised to monitor their costs carefully and regularly.
• The course includes Knowledge Check assignments per module, with a minimum number of required successfully passed checks listed below.

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2. Tutorial

2.1 Cloud Computing Basics

To complete the assignment: Register and study the AWS Cloud Foundation course, completing at least the essential modules for the DevOps course, which you must report on:

• Mandatory Modules:

  • 1, 2, 4 (sections 1-3)
  • 5 (sections 1-4)
  • 6, 7

• Optional Modules:

  • 4 (sections 4-6),
  • 5 (sections 5, 6),
  • 8, 9, 10

• Mandatory Labs:

  • 1, 2, 3

• Optional Labs (Highly Recommended):

  • 4, 5

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To complete the assignment, use AWS Academy resources to perform the following tasks:

• Re-visit/study Module 10: Auto Scaling and Monitoring
• Perform Lab 6, including additional tasks to investigate CloudWatch functionality:
  • Monitor metrics and dashboard visualizations, and use alarms.
  • Select components and metrics to monitor.
  • Provide observations and suggestions for using cloud monitoring services in your project.

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2.2 AWS Academy Class Modules and Labs (For Reference)

Modules:

• Module 1 - Cloud Concepts Overview
• Module 2 - Cloud Economics and Billing
• Module 3 - AWS Global Infrastructure Overview
• Module 4 - AWS Cloud Security
• Module 5 - Networking and Content Delivery
• Module 6 - Compute
• Module 7 - Storage
• Module 8 - Databases
• Module 9 - Cloud Architecture
• Module 10 - Auto Scaling and Monitoring

Labs:

• Lab 1 - Introduction to AWS IAM
• Lab 2 - Build your VPC and Launch a Web Server
• Lab 3 - Introduction to Amazon EC2
• Lab 4 - Working with EBS
• Lab 5 - Build a Database Server
• Lab 6 - Scale & Load Balance your Architecture

3. Questions

1. What metrics would you use for your website serving as:
   • A webshop for a travel agency?
   • A streaming music website?
   • An environment monitoring server collecting sensor data?
2. What is the benefit of using a dashboard compared to individual service metrics?
3. What is an Event Bus? How can you use it with your application? What are its inputs and outputs?
4. What tools for log collection and analysis does AWS provide in addition to CloudWatch? What supporting services are involved? What are the costs of logging and analysis?
5. What is the use of CloudWatch Alarms? How are alarms related to metrics? What other AWS services can be used with alarms? (Hint: Consider SNS and others.)
6. Is metrics collection different for AMI/VMs, serverless/Lambda, and containerized applications?