Gain hands-on experience writing an IaaS cloud application, specifically by using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Secondary goals are to gain experience administering a Windows Server machine and to gain/reinforce experience with SQL and Web programming.
This projects is a “Lite” version of healthcare.gov by following the instructions below (the original roll-out of healthcare.gov was a mess). This project consisted generally of 3 parts: [1] setting up the Web frontend; [2] setting up the cloud database to hold the specific health plans; [3] creating the Web functionality (which is given to you) to show the health plans on the Web page and making it so that a person can register for a plan.
Due diligence for any cloud project starts with setting a budget to limit resource usage overflow. Always be sure to consistently change the AWS region to what is physically closest (as seen in the top right of the dashboard). Create a cost budget, giving adequate notification metrics. It is recommended that an email notification would be sent after 75% of the indicated budget. Below is a screenshot of the budget I created.
The first step was creating a working frontend using a local SQL server. The frontend for the site was created using a “Microsoft Windows Server 2016 with SQL Server 2017 Express” EC2 instance. The default size was changed to "t3a.xlarge" for cost-feature maximization. The second step was to port the database functionality tested in part 1 to the cloud. An RDS “Microsoft SQL Server” was used to test fake health information data. Below is a sample SELECT query to test the frontend display, and the final project being displayed on localhost.
This project is no longer being served on AWS due to budget constraints.
Thanks goes to Marty Humphrey (University of Virginia, 2021) for providing project guidelines during CS 4740 S21.