Building a Highly Available, Scalable Web Application

Overview and objectives

Throughout various AWS Academy courses, you have completed hands-on labs.
You have used different AWS services and features to create compute instances,
install operating systems (OSs) and software, deploy code, and secure resources.
You practiced how to enable load balancing and automatic scaling, and how to
architect for high availability to build simple, lab-specific applications.

In this project, you’re challenged to use familiar AWS services to build a solution
without step-by-step guidance. Specific sections of the assignment are meant to
challenge you on skills that you have acquired throughout the learning process.

By the end of this project, you should be able to do the following:

• Create an architectural diagram to depict various AWS services and their

interactions with each other.
• Estimate the cost of using services by using the AWS Pricing Calculator.
• Deploy a functional web application that runs on a single virtual machine
and is backed by a relational database.
• Architect a web application to separate layers of the application, such as
the web server and database.
• Create a virtual network that is configured appropriately to host a web
application that is publicly accessible and secure.
• Deploy a web application with the load distributed across multiple web
servers.
• Configure the appropriate network security settings for the web servers
and database.
• Implement high availability and scalability in the deployed solution.
• Configure access permissions between AWS services.
Scenario

Example University is preparing for the new school year. The admissions
department has received complaints that their web application for student
records is slow or not available during the peak admissions period because of
the high number of inquiries.

You are a cloud engineer. Your manager has asked you to create a proof of
concept (POC) to host the web application in the AWS Cloud. Your manager
would like you to design and implement a new hosting architecture that will
improve the experience for users of the web application. You’re responsible for
building the infrastructure to host the student records web application in the
cloud.

Your challenge is to plan, design, build, and deploy the web application to the
AWS Cloud in a way that is consistent with best practices of the AWS Well-
Architected Framework. During the peak admissions period, the application
must support thousands of users, and be highly available, scalable, load
balanced, secure, and high performing.

The following image shows an example of the student records web application.
The site lists records of students who have applied for admission to the
university. Users can view, add, delete, and modify student records.

Solution requirements

The solution must meet the following requirements:

• Functional: The solution meets the functional requirements, such as the

ability to view, add, delete, or modify the student records, without any
perceivable delay.
• Load balanced: The solution can properly balance user traffic to avoid
overloaded or underutilized resources.
• Scalable: The solution is designed to scale to meet the demands that are
placed on the application.
• Highly available: The solution is designed to have limited downtime
when a web server becomes unavailable.
 • Secure:
o The database is secured and can’t be accessed directly from public
networks.
o The web servers and database can be accessed only over the
appropriate ports.
o The web application is accessible over the internet.
o The database credentials aren’t hardcoded into the web
application.
• Cost optimized: The solution is designed to keep costs low.
• High performing: The routine operations (viewing, adding, deleting, or
modifying records) are performed without a perceivable delay under
normal, variable, and peak loads.

Approach

Recommendation: Develop your project solution in phases. This will help you
ensure that basic functionality is working before the architecture becomes more
complex. After the application is working, you are encouraged to enhance the
solution with additional requirements.

Phase 1: Planning the design and estimating cost

In this phase, you will plan the design of your architecture. First, you will create
an architecture diagram.

Next, you will estimate the cost of the proposed solution, and present the
estimate to your educator. An important first step for any solution is to plan the
design and estimate the cost. As necessary, review the various components in
the architecture to adjust the estimated cost. Cost is an important factor when
building a solution because cost can help to determine the components and
architecture pattern to use.
Task 1: Creating an architectural diagram

Create an architectural diagram to illustrate what you plan to build. Consider

how you will accomplish each requirement in the solution.

References

• AWS Architecture Icons: This site provides tools to draw AWS architecture
diagrams.
• AWS Reference Architecture Diagrams: This site provides reference
architecture diagrams for a variety of use cases.

Task 2: Developing a cost estimate

Develop a cost estimate that shows the cost to run the solution in the us-east-1
Region for 12 months. Use the AWS Pricing Calculator for this estimate.

References

• What Is AWS Pricing Calculator?

• PowerPoint presentation template

Phase 2: Creating a basic functional web application

In this phase, you will start to build the solution. The objective of this phase is to
have a functional web application that works on a single virtual machine in a
virtual network that you create. By the end of this phase, you will have a POC to
demonstrate hosting the application on the AWS Cloud. You can then build upon
your work in later phases.

Task 1: Creating a virtual network

Create a virtual network to host the web application.

Tip: Create networking resources such as a virtual private cloud (VPC) and
subnets.

Reference

• AWS Academy Cloud Architecting – Lab: Creating a Virtual Private Cloud

Task 2: Creating a virtual machine

Create a virtual machine in the cloud to host the web application.

To install the required web application and database on the virtual machine, use
the JavaScript code from the following link: SolutionCodePOC

Tips:

• Use a compute service such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon

EC2).
• Use the latest Ubuntu Amazon Machine Image (AMI).

Task 3: Testing the deployment

Test the deployment of the web application to ensure it is accessible from the
internet and functional. Perform a few tasks, such as viewing, adding, deleting,
or modifying records.

Tip: To access the web application, use the IPv4 address of the virtual machine.

Phase 3: Decoupling the application components

In this phase, you will continue building. The objective is to separate the
database and the web server infrastructure so that they run independently. The
web application should run on a separate virtual machine, and the database
should run on the managed service infrastructure.

Task 1: Changing the VPC configuration

Update or re-create the virtual network components that are necessary to

support hosting the database separately from the application.

Note: You need private subnets in a minimum of two Availability Zones.

Reference

• AWS Academy Cloud Architecting – Lab: Creating a Virtual Private Cloud

Task 2: Creating and configuring the Amazon RDS database

Create an Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) database that runs
a MySQL engine. You can choose to create a provisioned instance or run it
serverlessly.

Notes:

• Allow only the web application to access the database.

• Don't enable enhanced monitoring.

Reference

• AWS Academy Cloud Foundations – Lab: Build Your DB Server and Interact
With Your DB Using an App

Task 3: Configuring the development environment

Provision an AWS Cloud9 environment to run AWS Command Line Interface

(AWS CLI) commands in later tasks.

Notes:

• Use a t3.micro instance for the AWS Cloud9 environment.

• Use Secure Shell (SSH) to connect to the environment.

Reference

• Creating Cloud9 Environment

Task 4: Provisioning Secrets Manager

Use AWS Secrets Manager to create a secret to store the database credentials,
and configure the web application to use Secrets Manager.

Use Script-1 from the following link to create a secret in Secrets Manager by
using the AWS CLI: AWS Cloud9 Scripts

Note: This .yml file also contains scripts that you will use in later tasks.

Reference

• create-secret in the AWS CLI Command Reference for AWS Secrets

Manager
Task 5: Provisioning a new instance for the web server

Create a new virtual machine to host the web application.

To install the required web application on the virtual machine, use the JavaScript
code from the following link: Solution Code for the App Server

For the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) profile on the EC2 instance,
attach the existing LabInstanceProfile profile. This profile attaches an IAM role
called LabRole to the instance so that it can fetch the secret securely.

Note: Optionally, you can continue to use the existing virtual machine for the
web application. However, you will need to reconfigure the application to
connect to Amazon RDS.

Reference

• AWS Academy Cloud Foundations – Lab: Build Your DB Server and Interact
With Your DB Using an App

Task 6: Migrating the database

Migrate the data from the original database, which is on an EC2 instance, to the
new Amazon RDS database.

Use Script-3 from the AWS Cloud9 Scripts file (cloud9-scripts.yml) to migrate the
original data into the Amazon RDS database. Recall that you used a script from
this file earlier to create the secret in Secrets Manager.

Reference

• AWS Academy Cloud Architecting – Lab: Migrating a Database to Amazon

RDS

Task 7: Testing the application

Access the application and perform a few tasks to test it. For example, view, add,
delete, and modify student records.
Phase 4: Implementing high availability and scalability

In this phase, you will complete the design and fulfill the remaining solution
requirements. The objective is to use the key components that you created in
earlier phases to build a scalable and highly available architecture.

Task 1: Creating an Application Load Balancer

Launch a load balancer. The endpoint will be used to access your web
application.

Tip: Use a minimum of two Availability Zones.

Reference

• AWS Academy Cloud Architecting – Lab: Creating a Highly Available

Environment

Task 2: Implementing Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Create a new launch template, and use an Auto Scaling group to launch the EC2
instances that host the web application.

To accomplish this, you can create an AMI from the running instance, or create a
new AMI and install the necessary packages and application code. Then,
configure an Auto Scaling group to use the load balancer.

Tips:

• Use a Target tracking policy.

• Set the Auto scaling group size according to your estimated requirements.
• You can use the default values (for example, for group size and CPU
utilization) initially and then adjust them later as needed.

Reference

• AWS Academy Cloud Architecting – Lab: Creating a Highly Available

Environment

Task 3: Accessing the application

Access the application and perform a few tasks to test it. For example, view, add,
delete, and modify student records.
Task 4: Load testing the application

Perform a load test on the application to monitor scaling.

Use Script-2 from the AWS Cloud9 Scripts file (cloud9-scripts.yml) to perform the
load test. Recall that you used scripts from this file in previous tasks.

Notes:

• Access the web application from the browser by using the load balancer
URL.
• Use AWS Cloud9 to run the load testing scripts against the load balancer.

Reference

• loadtest Tool Repository on GitHub