Cloud Computing: A Study of Infrastructure

The provided content discusses various topics related to cloud computing, software development, and IT management. The sources include academic papers, books, and online articles. The topics covered include the spiral model of software development, iterative development, cloud computing, and the benefits and drawbacks of SaaS models. Additionally, there are references to specific programming languages such as PHP and JavaScript.

<University>
PROJECT PROPOSAL FOR A STUDENT DATABASE
MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
by
<Your Name>
<Your Student Number>
<Module Name>
<Submission Deadline>
Word Count:
17th January 2017
<Lecturer’s Name and Course Number>
 <Your Name> <Your Student Number> 2017 1 of 14

Table of Contents
Project Proposal For a Student Database Management System.....................................3
Rationale and Context....................................................................................................3
Aims...............................................................................................................................5
Research Questions........................................................................................................5
Proposed Research Methods..........................................................................................5
Ethical and Access Issues...............................................................................................6
Potential Value of Research...........................................................................................7
Research Plan.................................................................................................................8
Initial Literature
Review.................................................................................................9
References....................................................................................................................11
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Project Proposal For a Student Database Management System
Information technology (IT) has revolutionised the way of working for businesses,
governments, organisations and individuals. Every entity, whether it is a for-profit
business, a government, a not-for-profit organisation or an individual, wants to
maximise the returns on resources. These resources include raw materials, skills,
processes, information, contracts, suppliers, customer, and time. The now ubiquitous
IT has enabled a far more efficient utilisation of the resources relevant to achieve the
goals of an entity than could have ever been achievable with just pen and paper. IT
not only not only pervades all the processes but also exerts an accelerating effect on
them (Frenzel and Frenzel, 2003).
The education industry is also building upon IT, and one of the domains is student
management. Running an educational institution is no different from running any
business. There are customers (students), staff, processes (administration,
management of students, courses, examinations, attendance, departments, classes and
other processes), ways to track performance (reports). This paper is a proposal for
software for managing an educational institution's students and related data.
Rationale and Context
This proposal is for a student database management system, which is a specific type
of Management Information System (MIS). An MIS is a collection of software,
hardware, business processes and trained staff whose goal is to provide the entity with
tools to manage the day-to-day operations, evaluation, as well providing insights for
strategic direction (Beal, n.d.). The project aims to produce software which will help
organisations manage administration, students, courses, examinations, attendance,
departments, and classes. This project will be for-profit and created by the developer.
The project is intended to be used by education institutions of all sizes and
complexity. The target consumers range from a private tuition centre to a multi-
location University. In keeping with the emerging trends of decentralisation of data
and subscribing to software rather than purchasing (Dubey and Wagle, 2007) (on
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disks like DVDs or CDs), the project will be a cloud-based service and offered as a
Software as a Service (SaaS).
Decentralisation in computing means that there is no concentration i.e. if data is
decentralised, then always latest updated data can be accessed from multiple devices
at multiple locations (Baschab and Piot, 2003). Cloud computing is a practical
implementation of decentralisation (Mell and Grance, 2011). An illustration of this
concept and the advantages for the user is the email service by Google, Gmail. A user
story can go like this - a user may check an email on his Internet-enabled mobile
during the morning commute to work, prepare a draft and then save in for sending
later. Then, when he reaches his office, from his desktop computer, he logs into his
email finds the draft, attaches a presentation file and sends the email. The data is
always latest and available on any number and type of devices the user wants. Next,
SaaS is one the ways of selling software and contrasts with shrink-wrap software.
SaaS gives access to customers without handing them over the executable files or the
source code. The bypassing of providing a copy of the software reduces the chances
of theft of the intellectual property rights of the developers/company. Also, the
software is now subscription-based, and the developers/company have the option to
keep charging (for the premium features). The benefit to the user is that he does not
need to download or keep on manually updating his copy of the software
(ClaimVantage, n.d.).
To meet these requirements in today's world invariably means using the public Intenet
and World Wide Web (WWW) to host a website (or web application) on a cloud
platform, and allow for subscription-based different plans of service for different
pricing. To these ends, the project will use PHP for the server-side programming
language; MySQL for the database; HTML (HyperText Transfer Language), CSS
(Cascading Style Sheets), JavaScript for Web standards development of client-
side. These components will be hosted on a cloud service provider (Amazon Web
Services). Several tiers (free and paid) will be offered under the freemium model of
business (Feinleib, 2012).
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Aims
The purpose of this project is to implement a software for the management of an
educational institution using IT to help them become more efficient and automate as
much of the routine work as possible. Managing a school or any business has the
same parts, being used over and over again. In the pen-and-paper implementation,
enormous volumes of paper documents need to be maintained, indexed, queried and
this slows down the progress. Also, the day-to-day operations consume the bulk of the
resources; staff rarely generates reports that could provide insights into long-term
direction. As an illustration, a school needs to manage time-schedule for students and
teachers. Now, this needs to be done over and over, for each class and teacher, year
after year. If a machine takes over this routine task, then that saves the same amount
of human effort, and human effort is a much more valuable resource than computing
resources.
Research Questions
This paper is a proposal for a project and together with the actual project
implementation will help to answer the following research questions:
 How can IT help education institutions manage students and the processes that
are required for teaching e.g. time-schedule?
 How can IT help education institutions make better-informed strategic
decisions?
 Can IT identify patterns in data which non-IT managements cannot?
Proposed Research Methods
This project is about proposing a new software implementation in the field of school
management. Also, the intent of such an endeavour will be assumed to be profit, and
thus the goal is to develop a system which will have more chances of success. To this
end, initially, an estimate of the current offerings (commercial and open-source) will
be made. Common features of all the available products will be distilled to arrive at a
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feature-set for the first version. Also, attempts will be done to identify features which
may not be common among the majority of solutions. Also, thought will be given to
scenarios which the available products may have overlooked. Online user forums,
support forums and complaint boards will be searched to help in this regard. Next, the
software will be developed, as explained later. Competitor research will be done about
their offerings to gauge an idea of the quantity and quality of features available and at
what price. The legal terms and conditions of the service providers will be studied to
find out the loopholes which may be exploited by malicious users and thus require
technical and legal protection.
Development of this project's software will follow a Software Development Life
Cycle (SDLC) be using the iterative model with each iteration of about two weeks.
Complete process will be undertaken for each iteration, and a review of the latest
product will be done to refine the requirements for the next iteration. Though we will
have a set of core requirements, to begin with, it is planned that the iterative model
will enable to prune those requirements which do not fit well, as well as point out
some requirements which may be essential for a complete functioning software. The
advantages being sought in the iterative model with an iteration of two weeks are not
available in conventional models like the waterfall model. The goal of making a
successful software dictate that user needs be met and conventional models are not
successful in this (Boehm, 1988).
Ethical and Access Issues
The project being proposed in this report will be used by education institutions to
manage students and other related processes. It may not be obvious at first, but such
data is a hot property among malicious users. Gagliordi (2014) claims that the data
about students is more attacked than retail and healthcare, especially because most of
the education IT infrastructure is weakly defended. Thus, it is imperative that the
project is secure and do all that is possible to ensure the data under its care in the
current threats landscape. To help implement security on the Internet, SSL/TLS
(Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security) will be used to secure the data as it
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moves from the end-user to the web server over the insecure Internet. Such a security
is often implemented on banking and e-commerce sites and is readily identifiable by a
green padlock icon alongside the website name in the web browser. Another ethical
concern is maintaining the confidentiality of the user data since private details about
the students will be available in the system. Such confidentiality will be maintained
using the same level of encryption as is being used by the banking industry (as
discussed earlier). Since this is an application that merely inputs some data, processes
it and gives an output, no ethical dilemmas are facing this report or the project
proposed in it.
Potential Value of Research
This project will benefit education institutions, especially the ones which have not yet
modernised their operations and are currently only using pen-and-paper. Also, the
benefits are expected to be more pronounced for smaller institutions than the larger
ones. Because this project will include a SaaS offering with multiple plans with
pricing proportional to the features opted for, even the clients with smaller budgets
can take a slice of the complete feature-set. The benefits include savings of time and
effort, better and faster reports and new insights for making the business more
profitable. Also, the developers/company providing this service are expected to
benefit once the (paying) customer base breaks even. The cost of adding a new client
(even if in the free plan) is incrementally very low and thus more people can try out
the service with the potential to become a paying customer later on. Once the number
of paying customers breaks even, the margin of profit will become significant. The
profit margin will keep on increasing because the core expenses are in the
development of the product, which only needs to be done whenever a new feature is
to be implemented or a bug is to be fixed. Hosting the service is and ongoing expense
but cheap (Amazon Web Services, n.d.). Also, software by definition requires coding
only once, and the number of users has no bearing on the effort needed to create it.
Thus, the profits will begin to outpace the costs incurred in maintaining new users. At
a wider scale, due to the modernisation offered by the platform, it is expected that the
schools in lesser developed regions of the world will be introduced to IT and not only
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the staff but the students also will be excited about the technology through this
project.
Research Plan
The project is about developing a software system. Thus, the project has many
portions which need to be worked on, and since the iterative approach is to be
followed, that means, the SDLC process will be repeated every fixed duration (two
weeks for this project). Still, the activities are well defined and may be estimated
based on previous experience and general industry standards. The plan may be
represented using a Gantt Chart, presented as follows:
Task Week
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Current products available
(standalone and Web-based)
===
Exploring commercial
products
===
Exploring open-source
products
===
Extracting common features ===
Searching for user feedback
and complaints
===
Finalising requirements === ===
Use cases === ===
Admin module development === ===
Student module development === ===
Course module development === ===
Examination module
development
=== ===
Department module
development
=== ===
Section module development === ===
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Testing and debugging ===
Deployment ===
Initial Literature Review
The success of an education institution as a business is dependent on the management,
which should be according to time and needs of the society (Panda, n.d.). This success
is partly founded on the right and efficient tools which will help the management save
time. This project will assist in achieving this success by providing efficient tools
built on the present-day technologies of cloud computing and SaaS. Cloud computing
eliminates up-front costs and risks of over-provisioning or under-provisioning and
allows for automatic upscaling or downscaling of resources as per the demand
(Armbrust et al., 2010). This facility is an advantage for a new product for which
demand cannot be predicted. The underutilization of servers is rampant in the industry
as companies would not want to lose on customers. On average, servers utilise only
10-30% of the computing power at their disposal (Marston et al., 2011). Now, this is
the scenario for companies that can afford such expenses. For individual developers or
small businesses, such overprovisioning is too costly, and they end up risking losing
customers if their project takes off and becomes a success. Cloud computing provides
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) i.e. bare metal hardware, networking components
and a basic installation of an operating system (Bhardwaj, Jain and Jain, 2010). For
the end-user in our scenario (education institution administration), this is of no
interest. The education institution is interested in managing students' database. To
enable that we will deploy our website/web application on top of a public cloud (Mell
and Grance, 2011) and provide SaaS offering.
For development on server-side, PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) will be used. PHP as a
web development language abstracts away the low-level details of the underlying
HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) technology and thus removes the potential for
insecure coding at this level (Scott and Sharp, 2002). Many authors believe that PHP
is a very suitable choice for new projects (Skvorc, 2014) and cite it being open-source
 <Your Name> <Your Student Number> 2017 9 of 14

and thus free as one of the reasons (Cubewires.com, n.d.). For database requirements,
the chosen database MySQL is a multi-user, and multithreaded relational database
server and its combination with PHP is cross-platform (Murray and Øyri, 2005).
Cross-platform means that the product being discussed can be run with ease and to
full functionality on multiple platforms. For web development, cross-platform means
that website/web application can run on a Windows server, or a Linux server with
equal ease. As for the choice of HTML/CSS/JavaScript, this combination is the only
pragmatic and the standard way of developing a website/web application. The
browsers, web authors and the standards have fought drawn-out wars driven by their
interests - the Browser Wars (Koch, 2006). Currently, every browser has the Web
Standards as the ideal and works hard to comply with it, be it a desktop browser,
mobile browser, or those on a game console or other devices. Thus, Web Standards is
the only proper way to build websites/web applications.
For the development methodology, for this project, the iterative approach will be
used. Contrary to the conventional way of stepping phases of development
sequentially, in interactive, incremental or iterative repetition is to complete the
product (Jennings-Balthazar, 2011). Each iteration allows for the design,
development, and testing of the additional feature until a fully functional software
application is ready to be deployed to customers. The advantage over another method
which has a big upfront design is the earlier analysis of unforeseen problems which
are often delayed otherwise (Francino, 2011).
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