Course Project

EDUCATOR GUIDE

Title: Regions and Availability Zones

There is no shortage of challenges that can arise on the job. Having the necessary knowledge
and skills to identify solutions to complex problems is one of the top employees need,
especially in cloud roles. This activity simulates real-world tasks encountered by cloud
professionals and challenges students to apply their AWS knowledge and technical skills to
evaluate and recommend an efficient, secure, and scalable solution.

Purpose:
To simulate real-world practice by providing a complex, authentic task designed to challenge
students to apply their AWS and technical knowledge, critical thinking, and problem-solving
skills in a real-world context

Objectives:
The objective(s) of the course project are to
• Identify the most efficient solution to address the computing challenge
• Compare and contrast alternative AWS solutions
• Determine and apply the appropriate AWS architecture to create a stable, fault tolerant
environment
• Summarize in writing the strengths and challenges of proposed solution(s)

Instructional use case(s):

• In-class discussion
• Individual student assignment
• Group project
• Self-paced learning with AWS Educate

Project scenario:
Read below to review the course project information you will share with the students.
Determine how students will submit their responses based on your instructional use case. The
project identifies assessed skills to support your planning efforts as you determine how to best
use this content in your course(s). Additionally, you will find a guidance to students section and
a resources section to further support you as you assist your students. A separate student
version of the project is located at the end of this guide. You may share the student version
with your students.

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COURSE PROJECT: Regions and Availability Zones
© Amazon Web Services
STUDENT INSTRUCTIONS: Draft a response to the following question and submit your response
to the instructor.

SKILLS ASSESSED: Relational databases, architecture, AWS Cloud computing, Amazon Elastic
Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), critical thinking

PROJECT TITLE: Regions and Availability Zones

SCENARIO:
Your company runs a customer facing event registration site. This site is built with a three-tier
architecture with web and application tier servers and a MySQL database. The application
requires six web tier servers and six application tier servers for normal operation but can run on
a minimum of 65 percent server capacity and a single MySQL database. When deploying this
application in a region with three Availability Zones (AZs), which architecture provides high
availability?

Which of these solutions would you recommend and why? Draft a detailed solution
response explaining the pros and cons of your recommended solution and why you selected a
specific solution.

Option A. A web tier deployed across two AZs with three Amazon EC2 instances in each AZ
inside an Auto Scaling group behind an Elastic Load Balancer; an application tier deployed
across two AZs with three Amazon EC2 instances in each AZ inside an Auto Scaling group behind
an EL; and one Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instance deployed with read
replicas in the other AZ.

Option B. A web tier deployed across three AZs with two Amazon EC2 instances in each AZ
inside an Auto Scaling group behind an Elastic Load Balancer; an application tier deployed
across three AZs with two Amazon EC2 instances in each AZ inside an Auto Scaling group behind
an ELB; and one Amazon RDS instance deployed with read replicas in the two other AZs.

Option C. A web tier deployed across 3 AZs with 2 Amazon EC2 instances in each AZ inside an
Auto Scaling group behind an ELB (elastic load balancer); an application tier deployed across
three AZs with two Amazon EC2 instances in each AZ inside an Auto Scaling group behind an
ELB; and a Multi-AZ RDS (Relational Database Service) deployment.

Guidance for students:

To assist students in drafting their response, encourage students to use the following guiding
questions to formulate their written response:

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COURSE PROJECT: Regions and Availability Zones
© Amazon Web Services
 Cite evidence from the scenario/AWS
Guiding questions:
resource(s):
What problem are you trying to solve?
Brainstorm possible solutions to address the identified
problem.
What are the strengths and challenges of each
solution? Which the solution efficient?
Which solution is most efficient? Stable? Fault
Tolerant? Secure?
What AWS resources can you use to help you address
this problem?
How must you present your response?

Recommended resources:

Regions and Availability Zones: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-

regions-availability-zones.html

Regions and Availability Zones:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Concepts.RegionsAndAvailabilityZ
ones.html

AWS webcast – design for availability:

https://youtu.be/Rh-yTPZnE-8

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COURSE PROJECT: Regions and Availability Zones
© Amazon Web Services
STUDENT VERSION

Project Title: Regions and Availability Zones

Skills Assessed: Relational databases, architecture, AWS Cloud computing, Amazon
EC2, critical thinking

Draft a response to the following question and submit your response to your instructor.

Scenario:
Your company runs a customer facing event registration site. This site is built with a three-tier
architecture with web and application tier servers and a MySQL database. The application
requires six web tier servers and six application tier servers for normal operation but can run on
a minimum of 65 percent server capacity and a single MySQL database. When deploying this
application in a region with three Availability Zones (AZs), which architecture provides high
availability?

Which of these solutions would you recommend and why? Draft a detailed solution
response explaining the pros and cons of your recommended solution and why you selected a
specific solution.

Option A. A web tier deployed across two AZs with three Amazon EC2 instances in each AZ
inside an Auto Scaling group behind an ELB; an application tier deployed across two AZs with
three Amazon EC2 instances in each AZ inside an Auto Scaling group behind an ELB; and one
Amazon RDS instance deployed with read replicas in the other AZ.

Option B. A web tier deployed across three AZs with two Amazon EC2 instances in each AZ
inside an Auto Scaling group behind an ELB; an application tier deployed across three AZs with
two Amazon EC2 instances in each AZ inside an Auto Scaling group behind an ELB; and one
Amazon RDS instance deployed with read replicas in the two other AZs.

Option C. A web tier deployed across three AZs with two Amazon EC2 instances in each AZ
inside an Auto Scaling group behind an ELB; an application tier deployed across three AZs with
two Amazon EC2 instances in each AZ inside an Auto Scaling group behind an ELB; and a Multi-
AZ Amazon RDS deployment.

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COURSE PROJECT: Regions and Availability Zones
© Amazon Web Services