Security, Networking, and

Internet: Transmitting

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 Table of Contents
Module Purpose ...........................................................................................................1
Module Description ......................................................................................................1
Module “Transmitting” CS Framework .........................................................................1
Instructional Objectives ...............................................................................................2
Gear and Gadgets........................................................................................................2
Background and Misconceptions ..................................................................................2
Technology Terminology..............................................................................................3
Focus Questions ...................................................................................................................... 4
AWeSome Activities ................................................................................................................ 5
Activity 1: Students as Servers, Routers, and Load Balancers ...........................5
Students as CDN Servers (25 minutes) .......................................................5
Students as Routers (25 minutes) ..............................................................6
Students as Load Balancers (25 minutes) ...................................................7
Activity 2: Pitch Startup Ideas and Hello World ..................................................9
Option A: Using Netflix Case Study to Pitch Startup Ideas on AWS ..........9
Option B: Hello World on Heroku .............................................................9
Home/Extension Connections .............................................................................................. 11
AWS Connections .................................................................................................................. 12
Additional Connections......................................................................................................... 12
 Facilitator Guide
Module Purpose
Students will understand how the Internet's infrastructure and systems enable cloud
computing.

Module Description
In this module students will be introduced to the
concepts of Internet routing and AWS Global
Infrastructure and how they play a role in security,
speed, and reliability of cloud computing.

Module “Transmitting” CS
Framework
This module aligns with the following Computer Science (CS) Framework(s) from
K12cs.org:

6-8.Networks and the Internet.Network Communication and

Organization
Computers send and receive information based on a set of rules called protocols.
Protocols define how messages between computers are structured and sent.
Considerations of security, speed, and reliability are used to determine the best
path to send and receive data.

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Instructional Objectives
After the completion of the module, the student will be able to:
1. Describe how cloud providers can help organizations manage a global
audience.
2. Identify the Internet protocol and infrastructure that enable effective
transmission of messages on the Internet.
3. Explain the purpose of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) in Internet routing.
4. List the basic components of the AWS Global Infrastructure.

Gear and Gadgets

 Internet Browser

Background and Misconceptions

It is a common misconception to think of the Internet as the World Wide Web (www).
In fact, the Internet enables the Web (along with many other use cases, such as video
streaming, gaming, and file transfers) to exist on top of it. Just as the transportation
system is much more than just roads, the Internet is much more than just web pages.
For example, without local, national, and international municipalities governing the
transportation system, traveling would be chaotic. Similarly, without agreed-upon
standards of communication (such as the Border Gateway Protocol [BGP]) deployed
locally and globally, transmitting computational data around the world would be
chaotic.

The average person is unaware of the software and hardware that make up the
Internet. It’s important to start with these principles first and then realize that when
you break it down, the foundation of the Internet is a collection of routers that
cooperate to keep track of the best paths to send information around the world. The
routers are connected by Internet service providers (ISPs) that cooperate to exchange
traffic among their customers. This Internet backbone allows companies to provide
services to customers using their servers (in the way that Netflix, for example,
provides video streaming). As described in the interactive and the case studies,
Netflix has chosen to run its services on servers in Amazon data centers by using
Amazon Web Services.

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Technology Terminology
availability zones: Consist of one or more discrete data centers.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Region: A physical location in the world where
Amazon has multiple availability zones.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP): The language that

routers on the Internet speak to share the best paths for
packets (units of data) to travel to reach their destinations.

data center: Has redundant power, networking, and

connectivity. Each is housed in a separate facility (a place,
in this case a building specifically designed to operate the
equipment necessary to run a data center).

Internet service provider (ISP): An organization that

provides services for accessing, using, or participating in
the Internet.

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 Focus Questions
Duration: 5-10 minutes per question, total of 25 minutes

What if different states or countries decided to try to use protocols

(Internet languages) other than BGP to determine the best paths to
send data? Could a global Internet exist with a variety of standards?

Netflix chose to make use of AWS for its

computing infrastructure. What would Netflix
have needed to do to scale to reach viewers
worldwide if it had tried to use its own custom
computing infrastructure? For example, it would
have needed to create data centers around the
world and accounted for redundancy and
failover. What would have been the likely impact
on product development had Netflix not chosen
to use cloud computing services?

AWS continues to expand its reach around the globe with new data
centers, availability zones, and regions. What factors do you think
encourage Amazon to expand to a particular area? What are some costs and
benefits that AWS incurs when adding to its global infrastructure?

What would a company such as Netflix need to do to ensure that its

application is able to continue running in the event of a natural
disaster that takes out an entire AWS data center? AWS availability
zone? AWS Region?

What security measures would you put in place to protect Internet

routers? What security measures would you put in place to protect data
centers? Think about both hardware and software.

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 AWeSome Activities
Activity 1: Students as…
Duration: 75 minutes
Overview
The following three activities each stand alone but follow a general style of gameplay
while covering different aspects of balancing and routing at different levels of the
cloud experience. The first activity focuses on content delivery
networks (CDNs) that distribute content geographically to
increase the speed and availability of content delivery. The
second activity focuses on Internet routing using BGP, which, as
was covered in the interactive, is used to optimize the routing of
information on the Internet. The third activity focuses on
application load balancing, which is the mechanism by which
incoming application requests are evenly distributed to
application servers. CDN and load balancing are not covered in
the integrative but are a great tie-in to routing. For more
information about those topics, see the following:

 https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/ (AWS CloudFront, a

CDN service)
 https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/ (AWS
Elastic Load Balancing overview)

Students as CDN Servers (25 minutes)

The content on the Internet can be distributed across a system of content delivery
network (CDN) servers that are strategically placed to increase speed and reliability
in geographic areas, while also managing the load on the origin of the content. In this
activity, students will act as CDN servers and share content with other students
acting as clients. With each passing round, change the content that will be distributed
to students based on their physical location within the classroom. The suggested
methodology and round breakdown are outlined below:
 For each round, prepare a short phrase or sentence and reveal it on a slip
of paper to a student on one side of the classroom.

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  For each round, designate the client students who should request the
message, and only allow each student client to get the content from the
CDN server student physically closest to him or her. Note that Internet
routing doesn’t always directly correspond to physical proximity (fast
connections over a larger distance can be faster than slower connections
over a short distance).
 In one round, include no CDN servers and make all the clients try to request
from you at the front of the classroom at about the same time. This will
demonstrate that the server is not able to handle so many requests at
once.
 In another round, have a specific student forget the message and have to
get a copy from you before servicing the client.

Students as Routers (25 minutes)

The Internet is composed of a series of routers that pass data around. In this activity,
students will act as routers and pass a simple message around. With each passing
round, add in new challenges so the students think about the challenges that routers
might face. The suggested methodology and round breakdown outlined below:
 For each round, prepare a short phrase or sentence and reveal it on a slip
of paper to a student on one side of the classroom.
 For each round, designate the destination student who should receive the
message, and allow each student to pass the message only one step closer
by choosing an adjacent student to relay the message to by voice.
 During the first round, keep it simple and add no challenges.
 In the second round, designate students as being unavailable to receive or
send a message in a way that requires the message to be passed to a
different set of students. Explain that on the Internet, routers can become
unavailable, and so new paths must be used.
 In the third round, require selected students to talk very slowly as they pass
the message. Explain that when Internet routers get congested, they slow
down; then explain that the protocols of the Internet are set up to adapt
and reroute for efficiency.
 In the fourth round, designate some students who must "forget" the
message once it’s told to them. Have the students relay that the message
was forgotten and force them to relay the fact that it was forgotten back to
the first student in the chain. Explain to them that on the Internet, routers
can have hardware issues, so resending a message using a different route
may become necessary.
 In the fifth round, designate a few students who have the ability to change
a word in the message. To make this most effective, discuss with a few
students privately ahead of time that they will play this role, and discuss
simple ways that they could modify the message (for example, by adding or
removing a single word or changing a single word). Explain that on the

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 Internet, if an attacker is able to gain access to a router, he or she can
change the messages being passed.
 As time allows, have the students brainstorm ways to ensure fast, reliable,
and secure transfer of messages. For example, they could suggest testing
the routes for speed or having a mechanism to report congested or
unavailable routers. They could implement a checksum (a digit
representing the sum of the correct digits in a piece of stored or
transmitted digital data, against which later comparisons can be made to
detect errors in the data) or encrypt the message so that it can’t be
changed or intercepted.

Note:
Optional: A variation on this activity would be to designate some students as data
centers and allow them to write down the messages for each round. Then designate
some students as client applications that request the message from a specific round
from a nearby data center. In that respect, teach students that with AWS Regions, a
local copy makes retrieving information more efficient. Still other students could be
designated as data centers in a region and allowed to keep a copy of each message
told to them by the other student data center in their region.

Students as Load Balancers (25 minutes)

Applications on the Internet are able to be more reliably available because several
application servers can share the load of the many client requests that come in. The
distribution of the requests is handled by an application load balancer. In this activity,
a set of students will act as application servers, a set of students will act as load
balancers, and a set of students will act as clients. The suggested methodology and
round breakdown are outlined below:
 For each round, prepare a simple task that requests a student client to
request information from a student application server. For example, one
round could be What’s the weather? and another could be What time is it?
The task is not the point of the activity—it’s the act of accomplishing the
request and distribution of the requests.
 For each round, designate the destination students who should act as
application servers (the ones who can answer the request) and give them
all the same way to answer/perform the task, load balancers (the ones who
will decide which application-server student the client student will talk to),
and the clients (requesters), respectively.
 In one round, have no application-load-balancer students and see the
disorganization (or self-balancing) that occurs.
 In another round, have the application load balancers send all the requests
to a single application-server student (and see that a queue/line forms
waiting for that particular application server to answer).

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 In another round, have many clients that want to accomplish the same
request. In the middle of the round, pause and teach the task to a few
students who are idle, making them active application servers that can now
be available to help reduce the load.
 In another round, have a few requests come in and many application
servers at the beginning. Pause the round in the middle and have a
few of the application servers take a break, because there are not
many requests at this time.

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 AWeSome Activities
Activity 2: Pitch Startup Ideas and Hello World
Duration: 25 minutes
Option A:
Using Netflix Case Study to Pitch Startup Ideas on AWS

Have students watch the videos in the Netflix

case study:
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-
studies/netflix/.

Then have students create a presentation as if

they were members of a startup company
explaining why they should launch the company
on AWS. Break the students into groups, each
creating a different startup company that runs on
AWS.

Some ideas for companies include a social media platform, an app that helps people
remember lists (for example, shopping, to-do, and so on), and a weather app. If they
get stuck, have them think about how they might support video, virtual reality, and
devices such as the Amazon Echo.

Option B:
Hello World on Heroku
The purpose of this activity is to show students how easy it can be to create a basic
application that runs in the cloud. Have students sign up for a free Heroku account.
Heroku runs on top of AWS. Then have them follow one of the “hello world”
examples:

 https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-nodejs (Following
this tutorial will create a very simple, prepackaged node.js application.)

 https://www.heroku.com/languages (Similarly, an application written in another

language can be used by following one of these other tutorials, which are also

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 prepackaged, step-by-step guides that allow a very basic application to be
deployed in the cloud.)

This option requires a computer with Internet access and the ability for students to
install applications. If this is a challenge, consider using a free virtual machine tool
from AWS EC2 (https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/tutorials/launch-windows-
vm/).

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 Home/Extension Connections
Duration: 30 minutes
Traceroute: Traceroute is a tool that shows the path packets take to reach a
destination. It is available on desktop operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS X,
and Linux. It can even be installed as an app on mobile devices. In addition, a wide
variety of online traceroute tools provide visualizations of geographical paths.

Read more about traceroute at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traceroute.

Use traceroute from a mobile device or computer at home or at school (or other
location). Compare the results.

 On Windows, the command is tracert.

 On Mac OS and Linux, the command is traceroute.
Shown below is an example trace to the server google.com. Each line represents a
router “hop” that the packets travel through. Many of the online visual tools work
sporadically, so installing a local visual tool (such as Open Visual Traceroute,
https://visualtraceroute.net/) may be an option. However, even without installing
extra software, students can look up approximate geolocation of the routers with a
website such as IP Location Finder: https://www.iplocation.net/.

Example Output:

traceroute google.com
traceroute to google.com (172.217.8.174), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 hopelovepeacejoy (192.168.11.1) 1.828 ms 1.254 ms 1.008 ms
2 142.254.211.29 (142.254.211.29) 9.128 ms 11.921 ms 9.957 ms
3 agg63.amstnyeb01h.northeast.rr.com (24.29.42.213) 199.584 ms 30.156 ms 23.726 ms
4 24.58.33.82 (24.58.33.82) 11.703 ms 12.790 ms 11.386 ms
5 be26.albynyyf01r.northeast.rr.com (24.58.32.56) 21.253 ms 22.972 ms 23.066 ms
6 bu-ether16.nycmny837aw-bcr00.tbone.rr.com (66.109.6.74) 20.411 ms 25.576 ms 25.409 ms
7 0.ae2.pr0.nyc20.tbone.rr.com (107.14.19.147) 21.223 ms
0.ae1.pr0.nyc20.tbone.rr.com (66.109.6.163) 29.338 ms 17.822 ms
8 ix-ae-6-0.tcore1.n75-new-york.as6453.net (66.110.96.53) 21.688 ms
ix-ae-10-0.tcore1.n75-new-york.as6453.net (66.110.96.13) 19.935 ms
ix-ae-6-0.tcore1.n75-new-york.as6453.net (66.110.96.53) 45.271 ms
9 72.14.195.232 (72.14.195.232) 33.622 ms 19.713 ms 18.842 ms
10 108.170.248.35 (108.170.248.35) 19.265 ms
108.170.248.66 (108.170.248.66) 18.500 ms
108.170.248.116 (108.170.248.116) 41.503 ms
11 216.239.54.207 (216.239.54.207) 24.323 ms 23.056 ms
216.239.58.111 (216.239.58.111) 19.749 ms
12 216.239.57.196 (216.239.57.196) 34.915 ms
216.239.59.0 (216.239.59.0) 34.072 ms 40.462 ms

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 13 209.85.250.147 (209.85.250.147) 36.595 ms 36.356 ms 32.890 ms
14 108.170.244.1 (108.170.244.1) 32.635 ms
108.170.243.225 (108.170.243.225) 34.978 ms
108.170.244.1 (108.170.244.1) 35.807 ms
15 72.14.232.169 (72.14.232.169) 32.970 ms
72.14.232.153 (72.14.232.153) 35.324 ms 36.157 ms
16 ord37s08-in-f14.1e100.net (172.217.8.174) 36.245 ms 41.448 ms 34.459 ms

AWS Connections

AWS Global Infrastructure (https://aws.amazon.com/about-

aws/global-infrastructure/) describes in detail the data centers and
other infrastructure that make up AWS.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk (https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/)

is similar to Heroku; it provides a platform for hosting applications
in the cloud.

Additional Connections
Jain, Vinit, and Brad Edgeworth. “BGP Fundamentals.” January 1, 2018.
http://www.ciscopress.com/articles/article.asp?p=2756480.

Rekhter, Y., T. Li, and S. Hares, eds. A Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4).
January 2006. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4271.

“The Cloudcast—Cloud Computing Basics.” December 29, 2011.

TheCloudcastNET video, 15:43.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3nyYPhryiY.

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Some of the activities refer to content that is not maintained by Amazon or Amazon
Web Services. Links to outside websites and resources are inserted for educational
value and does not necessarily indicate endorsement of material at those sites, or
any associated organization, product or service. Such material is assembled in good
faith, is provided “AS IS” and is believed to be accurate at the time of its publishing,
but readers are encouraged to evaluate the accuracy of any information found.

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