Online AWS Environment Constructor, a 2021-2022 Oregon State University Senior Capstone project led by Lucas Pichette.
Front-End:
- HTML5
- CSS3
- JavaScript ES6
Back-End:
- AWS
- Route53
- S3
- CloudFront
Possible additional technologies if time/availability permits:
- AWS Lambda
- AWS RDS
- JavaScript framework such as Vue / React / Angular
Reasoning Behind Chosen Technologies
Front-End technologies are all standard to web development. Due to their established nature, every web browser and search engine understands how to use the information from it easily, meaning it’s very SEO-friendly.
- HTML5: The standard for DOM creation, easy to parse by web bots, and easy to translate into a visible structure by the browser for the client.
- CSS3: The standard for DOM customization/styling. Easy to translate by web browser into visible changes to the DOM by the browser for the client.
- JavaScript ES6: The standard for user interaction in websites. Some interaction can be created without JavaScript, but for the most part JavaScript, or a child language of JavaScript, is needed in order to enhance user interaction.
- AWS: Highly affordable, exchanging capital expenses with variable expenses. Furthermore, AWS is the most secure and reliable cloud technology provider in the market.
- Route53: A Domain Name System (DNS). In our project’s case,it translates a Domain Name to an S3 Endpoint Alias. Typical DNS services don’t have this kind of service, and instead just translates Domain Names to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.
- Simple Storage Service (S3): A file storage system that allows for static-hosting of stored files. Ludicrously affordable, extremely durable, and extremely easy to use. One of the standards, if not THE standard, of AWS services. By using Lambda we can turn a statically-served website from S3 into a dynamic website with ease, and reducing costs drastically. No more LAMP-stacks with server-less architecture around!
- CloudFront: A Content Distribution Network (CDN). Delivers content from S3 to edge-locations around the globe for caching, reducing serving expenses. You can invalidate cached resources as well, allowing for forced object refreshes.
The nature of the project is to deliver content as quickly as possible while being extremely easy to use. Nothing particularly crazy is going on in the background, in fact, in theory everything will be served to the client statically, and then JavaScript will be used to dynamically changed the content on the screen depending upon their input.
