COCS71188 Enterprise Cloud Computing In The Aws Environment - Staffordshire University

Overview
This document will provide you with information regarding the assessment for the module Cloud, Virtualisation and Communications. In here you will find an overview of the company which you are consulting for and details of their requirements. In this scenario you will be advising a company called RailIT which is a company which provides IT infrastructure support to a number of companies. The company started out supporting specialist IT infrastructure and is now involved with a number of on premise solutions. The Headquarters for RailIT is located in Stafford, England near to the centre of the town.

Company Background

RailIT has noticed like lots of companies the way which they are now working has changed.

They had to adapt to working at home due to the Covid restrictions and as such they provided each employee with equipment and a Internet connection to continue working. Although this legal requirement has now been removed they have noticed they did suffer with a reduced productivity and in some of the areas of the business this even improved. As such the company will now allow the staff to work off site if they prefer unless physically required for customer meetings. This has introduced two issues which are an excess of office space and meeting rooms which are not required and additional car parking capacity which again is not needed. The issue with the office space has been resolved as a neighbouring company which also had excess space has now decided to take over the additional office spaces. The issue they still have though is the car parking spaces which they control for the office block. The car park has a capacity for 260 cars and currently on average each day around 40 cars are parked. In the last few months the peak usage has been 60 cars. The intention for this is to let out the additional car parking spaces to local commuters who use the nearby railway station. These computers will pay in advance for a parking space for a month and anyone who is parking which is not approved will be fined. The signage for the parking fines are being dealt with by a third party company. The cost is predicted currently to be £30 per month per space, but this is yet to be finalised.

Although RailIT is an IT infrastructure company they have no experience in dealing with cloud computing. They are looking to learn about this technology and they see this project as a way of practically learning about this. They are not intending to use any of the infrastructure which they have onsite and instead want advice about doing this project 100% in the cloud. The information which they learn from your consultant advice will be used to influence any other future projects which they could recommend as a cloud solution. You are to consult on this project, but the final solution will be built by their own team once they have completed a series of training courses. The long term vision for the company is that they sell this same solution, here to two offices which are in France, which they currently support and have a similar problem.

Problem
- 200 car parking spaces are available to be used by paying customers in the head quarters car park
- The payment and registration for the spaces will be done on the 1st of the Month via a website
- The customer will receive a email 7 days before the 1st of the month as a reminder to pay the next months fees
- The registration details of any car using the car park that have not paid, will be provided to the independent enforcement company along with a photograph of the car entering and leaving the car park with applicable date and time.
- The car park already has a full HD camera system installed to monitor the cars which are coming and going as this was needed for security purposes when it was only used by company staff in the past.
- The solution needs to be highly available, secure, durable and low cost. The Cloud infrastructure can not cost more than they are going to make from this project.

Things to Consider in your design
As a basic list here the company has provided a list which needs to be considered

- A location where customers and can login and update their details and deal with payments
- Ability for the company to be able to run reports quickly on the status and utilisation of the car park
- Ability to processes the pictures which the cameras will taking of cars entering and leaving
- Ability to store pictures and records of activity for 12 months as a minimum
- To be able to send messages to the car park users in the event of any issues
- Reminders being sent to the users to renew any payments
- Security to ensure that the environment is only accessible to validated users

This list is not definitive and will be added to by your knowledge in the area.
The company will require the Cloud infrastructure which will be able to meet these requirements. They have no experience in cloud computing as stated and as such are open to suggestions on the technology they can use to get this system operating as quickly as possible.

To ensure that this project does not become expensive one of the IT staff has recommended using AWS as a part of the project. In the report give a brief overview to the management team on what AWS LEX actually is and where this can assist with this project. In addition, give examples where this technology is currently used, so the management team can relate and do further reading in this area.

Assessment Details
As a part of this you will need to consider:
- The potential problems which you recognise that they need to resolve
- Potential technology which will resolve these issues and a discussion why
- Benefits and risks of developing a Cloud based IT Strategy discussion
- Creation of a suitable topology using the AWS environment, with screen captures to show
- Discussion on Amazon Lex and its usage

As a part of this you will create an environment inside of AWS Cloud. You have access to this through the same location where you are accessing the tutorial material at the moment. As you will notice you do not have unlimited access to these and your individual limit is given at the top of the screen. If you use the sandbox environment you are limited on your time to 3 hours so do work on what you are doing and recreate the design which you specified. At the end of 3 hours your work will be deleted automatically by the system. To resolve this issue we recommend that you use the AWS Learner labs which we have provided for you separately. In the AWS Learner lab you have $100 of credit which you can spend and you can work on an environment for 4 hours. At the end of the 4 hours all of your work will still be saved and you simply need to stop and start again the environment. There is no requirement to write code for this assignment; you are simply building the infrastructure so please just get appropriate screen grabs of the console to show this setup, with additional suitable screens to assist the reader. The screen grabs should be put into the Appendix at the end of the report and with this discuss the different options which you have chosen and why in the setup.

The word limit for this assignment is 3000 words

Attachment:- Enterprise Cloud Computing.rar