Detailed Report: HMB Hosting Environment on AWS - Analysis

This report provides a comprehensive overview of an AWS-based hosting environment designed for optimal performance and data security. The solution leverages various AWS services, including Route 53 for DNS management, CloudFront for content delivery, S3 for storage and backup, and Elastic Beanstalk for application deployment. The report details the use of EC2 web servers, load balancers for traffic distribution, and RDS MySQL for database management. It highlights the benefits of each component and how they collectively contribute to a scalable, efficient, and secure hosting infrastructure. The report also references supporting documentation and figures to illustrate the setup and functionality of the described environment. The application uses PHP and deploys it through Elastic Beanstalk. The report emphasizes the importance of RDS to separate the database engine from the web server for performance and security.

Hosting Environment
To ensure better performance and data security for our clients, we hosted our application on
AWS (Amazon Web Service). Because it provides scalable services which are fast and cost-
effective because we have to pay for what we use in term of connectivity time and data limit.
To deploy the application quickly and efficiently, we used Elastic Beanstalk orchestration service
on AWS. The figure below represents the clear picture of our hosting environment.
Figure: HMB hosting environment on AWS
For the good understanding, we have shortly described each of the component that is used in
our hosting environment.
Route 53
Route 53 is a highly scalable DNS (Domain Name System), which is provided by Amazon. This is
a highly scalable web service that can perform three useful functions [1]. Three functions are
DNS routing, registration of a specific domain, and health checking of application. Also, its fast,
secure and highly available.

1
CloudFront
CloudFront is Amazon’s web services that can boost up the distribution speed of dynamic and
static web content among users [2]. Cloudfront can deliver web content by using a wide range
of networks. These networks are connected to the worldwide data centers. These data centers
are known as edge locations. We decided to use this service for geo-targeting feature of
CloudFront as it can detect the geographical area of a specific country where a user accesses
the web content.
S3 Bucket
AWS offers a storage service named “S3 bucket”. We obtained this service to take the backup
of Amazon Relational Database and to store logs related to the system health.
Elastic Beanstalk
With the help of amazon Elastic Beanstalk, one can quickly deploy an application in the cloud. It
helps manage and reduce the complexity in the AWS cloud as it supports most of the
programming languages such as Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, and others. Also, we can monitor
the health of our application on Elastic Beanstalk panel [3].
We created users’ dash panel using PHP by which they are able to add symptom forms to their
website. Our team used PHP platform while deploying the application through Elastic Beanstalk.
The below figure shows our Elastic Beanstalk console panel.

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Figure: Elastic Beanstalk Console
EC2 Web server
The main function of a web server is to process, store, and provide the web pages to the users.
A web server can help to communicate between the server and the client. We installed Amazon
Linux web server because of its high-level performance and maximum security.
Load Balancer
This is a feature of AWS. It can distribute the incoming application traffic among many targets
[4]. A load balancer can handle real-time, streaming, and web socket workflows efficiently.
Use of Load Balancer would provide low latency and enhance the application performance.

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RDS MySQL
Amazon RDS will help us to manage and scale MySQL deployment in AWS. Purpose of using
RDS was to keep our database engine separate from our web server to improve the performance
and security of our application.
References
[1]A. Shackelford. CloudFront and DNS Management. In Beginning Amazon Web Services with
Node. js (pp. 93-120). Apress, Berkeley, CA 2015.
[2] https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront//(November 2012) 2015.
[3]"AWS Elastic Beanstalk – Deploy Web Applications", Amazon Web Services, Inc., 2020.
[Online]. Available: https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/. [Accessed: 17- Mar- 2020].
[4]C. Newcombe, T. Rath, F. Zhang, B. Munteanu, M. Brooker, and M. Deardeuff. How
Amazon web services uses formal methods. Communications of the ACM, 58(4), pp.66-73 2015.