Comp150CPA Homework Exercise 5: Designing for the cloud

• Objective: to make and reason about design tradeoffs in utilizing a cloud to solve a problem.
• Deliverables: a block design of a solution to a specific problem, with details of consistency, concurrency, and methodologies needed.
• Work mode: exercise/lecture reinforcement, group work and submissions encouraged.

Overview

In groups of 2-5 people, please create an overall design for the following situation:

The Foo Corporation wants to sell information on what users visited what sites. There are three kinds of entities:

• the corporation, which provides services.
• the customers, who buy information from the corporation.
• the users, that this information concerns.

• The customer embeds a web bug into their web pages that calls up the corporation and logs an access.
• The user clicks on that page, activating the bug.
• The corporation logs the access by the user's network identity, i.e., the IP address.
• When the customer asks, the corporation provides:
  • a log of IP addresses of users that visited the customer's site.
  • a list of all other customers that user visited.
  • an analysis of history, showing which sites led to the customer's site, and which ones followed, for users.
  Please do the following:
  1. Please create an overall block diagram for the solution, depicting data sources, Map/Reduce, Distributed Hashing, and other processes.
  2. Please distinguish between real-time and offline processes.
  3. Please document which cloud objects exhibit strong or eventual consistency.
  4. Please justify your answer with a short paper describing the choices you made, and why.

  Submitting completed assignments

  This assignment is a bit more complex to submit because you need to submit machine-readable documents. We will submit this assignment as a set of files. Click here to fill out a form that -- when submitted -- generates a printable form that can be saved to a file, e.g., hw05.html. Next, provide this along with everything else via provide:

   
  provide comp150cpa hw05submit hw05.pdf hw05.html
  

  where hw05.pdf is a pdf of your documented design solution. Completed assignments will be printed, graded by hand, and scanned back into the system. The grade for hw05submit will be listed as the grade for hw05 in provide, so we can give everyone in the group credit.