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Week 5 - Cloud Intro

Discussion​

Welcome to week 5! This week we'll talk about the cloud. But first, let's review last week's asynchronous content.

Review​

Review & Discussion

Let's review our Shopping Cart API project from last week.

We asked you to create a Shopping Cart API to store orders and items in those orders. As a refresher, here was the data we asked you to store:

  • Orders have the following information: OrderReferenceNumber, CustomerName, CustomerAddress, Items[], TotalPrice, OrderDate, and Notes
  • Items have the following information: ItemName, Quantity, Price, and Description

We also asked for the following API endpoints Adjust your queries and indexing to improve your performance.

Some requirements to consider:

  1. You MUST have 1 (and only one) PUT /orders endpoint for creating/replacing orders.
  2. You MUST have 1 (and only one) GET /orders endpoint for retrieving orders.
    1. Your GET endpoint MUST support query parameters for filtering by OrderReferenceNumber and CustomerName.
  3. Add a GET /reports?item={ItemName} endpoint that allows you to report the total sales and quantity of items sold for a given item.

How did you implement this? What challenges did you face? What did you learn?

This Week​

Projects​

Before we move into this week's topics, lets first discuss projects. Splitting into groups we will ask you to select a project of interest to you as a theme for the remainder of the bootcamp. We'll discuss suggestions and constraints during our discussion.

Cloud Breadth​

The main topic of the week is a broad introduction to cloud technologies. We'll discuss the major cloud providers, the services they offer, and how to use them. We'll talk about general cloud concepts, services, cost management, and more. Here is a rough outline of the topics we'll cover as a framework for our discussion:

  • Cloud Providers - AWS, Azure, GCP
  • Hybrid Cloud and On-Premises Cloud
  • Cloud Services
    • Compute
    • Storage & Databases
    • Networking
    • Security
    • Cost Management
  • Free tiers / Exploring at low cost

CI/CD​

The second topic of the week is Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD, sometimes Continuous Deployment). These two topics are often discussed together, and are often implemented together, but they are distinct concepts.

Continuous Integration is the practice of merging code changes into a shared repository frequently (often multiple times per day) and validating those changes with various levels of automated testing.

Continuous Delivery is the practice of automating the software delivery process so that software can be reliably released at any time. This includes

A Note on Terminology

Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment are often used interchangeably. Some people however refer to them as distinct concepts. This article from Atlassian discusses the differences between the two.

However, we will use the terms interchangeably in this course as we prefer not to distinguish between ability to deliver at the push push of a button and automated deployment to production. We feel the difference between those two approaches is relatively trivial and the choice to deploy to production automatically is driven more by business needs than technical ones.

There are a number of tools for running CI/CD pipelines. Jenkins is one of the most popular, particularly for self-hosted solutions. But there are others such as CircleCI, and TravisCI. Additionally, many Git platform providers (Atlassian, GitLab, GitHub, etc.) also provide some sort of CI/CD platform as do all the major cloud providers. For example for this course we will discuss GitHub Actions.

Infrastructure as Code​

The final piece of this week's discussion is a brief introduction to Infrastructure as Code Team dynamics Topics to discuss this week:

  • Javascript
  • Server rendering vs. client rendering
  • Frameworks: React, Angular, Vue, etc.
  • React deep dive
  • Trends in front-end development
    • Microfrontendsp

Reading & Async Content​

Practice​

Define the project goals and objectives​

  1. In 50 characters or less tell what does
  2. Define high-level goals (3-5) of the system.
  3. Define preliminary requirements - Try answering the question: What does your system need to do?
  4. Are there any measurable performance metrics?

Set up a CI/CD pipeline for your project using GitHub actions or similar​

  1. Add one or more CI pipelines - Consider linters and unit tests.
  2. Add a CD pipeline - Use terraform or similar to deploy a cloud resource as your "Hello, World" application.

Explore cloud technologies that interest you.​

This is an open-ended exploration. Explore and get familiar with the cloud technologies relevant to your project.