📝 ASSIGNMENT INSTRUCTIONS: Week 10 - Teach One Another: Infrastructure Standards
- Purpose
- Scenario
- Tasks
📝 ASSIGNMENT RESOLUTION

📝 ASSIGNMENT INSTRUCTIONS: Week 10 - Teach One Another: Infrastructure Standards

Purpose

Create a set of standards for a company and understand how enforcing standards via code can increase predicability and reduce administrative overhead.

Scenario

You were asked to assist the cloud engineering team to migrate from an on-premise* infrastructure to a cloud-based infrastructure for a medium-sized company with $500 million in annual revenue. This company currently has about 500 internal and customer-facing web services, web applications, and other data integration-based applications. You are to report to the CTO (chief technology officer) with your plan on how to perform this lift-and-shift from on-premise to cloud. At this stage of the planning, you are only to report back on the naming conventions, consistency, reliability, and the potential cost management. After discussing with the teams, you have identified these following resources that need to be created for each application:

Virtual machines (minimum of 4) (since it's a lift-n-shift)
DNS
Logging management
Load balancers (a single load balancer will be sufficient)
IAM role for permissions
Cloud database
Secrets manager (for rotation of secrets)
Cloud storage (to store files and other assets)

The final requirement the CTO gave you was to have a smaller, scaled down environment for the test environment as well as a production environment for each application.

Tasks

As a team, submit the following:

A diagram with this cloud architecture (how each cloud resource would interact with the other resources)
A naming convention (since we are utilizing a staging/production environments with 500 applications, naming convention is necessary)
A timeline with the lift-and-shift migration process. For example:
Target start date
Target staging completion time length
Target production completion time length
Your plan for ensuring there is no company down time
How IaC can play a major role

* On-Premise: On-premises ("on-prem") refers to IT infrastructure, software, or systems deployed, operated, and maintained locally within an organization's own physical facilities rather than on remote, third-party cloud servers. It gives businesses full control over hardware, data, and security, but requires managing all maintenance, upgrades, and costs.

📝 ASSIGNMENT RESOLUTION

1. Cloud Architecture Diagram

---
title: '~ Lift-and-Shift Cloud Architecture ~'
config:
  theme: dark
---

flowchart TD

  User["Users / External Systems"]
  DNS["(a) DNS Service"]
  LB["(b) Load Balancer"]
  VM1to4["(c) 4 Virtual Machines"]
  DB["(d) Cloud Database"]
  Storage["(e) Cloud Storage"]
  Secrets["(f) Secrets Manager"]
  Logs["(g) Logging System"]
  IAM["(h) IAM Role / Permissions"]

  User --> DNS
  DNS --> LB
  LB --> VM1to4

  VM1to4 <--> DB
  VM1to4 <--> Storage
  VM1to4 <--> Secrets
  VM1to4 <--> Logs
  IAM --> VM1to4

Architecture Flow

Step	Component	Purpose
a	DNS	Routes requests to the correct application endpoint
b	Load Balancer	Distributes traffic across VM instances
c	Virtual Machines	Host the migrated applications
d	Cloud Database	Stores application data
e	Cloud Storage	Stores files, assets, and backups
f	Secrets Manager	Manages credentials and secret rotation
g	Logging	Centralized monitoring and auditing
h	IAM	Controls access permissions between services

2. Naming Convention

Applications: 500 total
Environments required (2 total): Test (staging) and production
Resources required (8 total): Virtual Machines + DNS + Load Balancer + Logging System + IAM Role + Cloud Database + Secrets Manager + Cloud Storage

Since 500 applications × 2 environments × multiple resources exist, structured naming prevents chaos.

Standard Pattern

<company>-<application>-<environment>-<resource>-<region>-<number>

Component Meaning

Element	Description	Example
company	Company identifier	`acme`
application	Application short name	`billing`
environment	`stg` or `prd`	`prd`
resource	Resource type	`vm`, `db`, `lb`
region	Cloud region	`us-east`
number	Instance number	`01`

Examples

Resource	Name
VM	`acme-billing-prd-vm-us-east-01`
Load Balancer	`acme-billing-prd-lb-us-east`
Database	`acme-billing-prd-db-us-east`
Storage	`acme-billing-prd-storage-us-east`
Secrets Manager	`acme-billing-prd-secret-us-east`
DNS	`billing-prd.company.com`

Benefits

Benefit	Explanation
Predictability	Engineers immediately know what the resource is
Automation	IaC scripts can auto-generate names
Scalability	Easy to support thousands of resources
Monitoring	Easier log filtering and metrics grouping

3. Migration Timeline

Lift-and-shift (also called rehosting) is a cloud migration strategy where applications are moved from on-premise servers to cloud servers without changing the application architecture.
Assuming 500 applications, migration must occur in phases.

Phase	Duration	Duration (%)	Description
Planning	2–3 weeks	~10	Inventory systems, dependencies, architecture
Infrastructure Setup	2 weeks	~8	Create base cloud networking, IAM, logging
Staging Migration	6–8 weeks	~27	Migrate applications to staging environment
Testing	3 weeks	~12	Functional, performance, security testing
Production Migration	8–10 weeks	~35	Gradual migration of live services
Optimization	2 weeks	~8	Cost and performance tuning

Total weeks: 23-28 weeks or 5.3-6.5 months (100 %)

Example Schedule (Optimistic)

Milestone	Target
Migration Start	Week 1
Staging Ready	Week 8
Production Ready	Week 18
Full Migration Complete	Week 22

4. Ensuring Zero Downtime

Strategy	Explanation
Blue-Green Deployment	Old system stays active while new cloud system is validated
DNS Cutover	Gradually shift traffic to cloud infrastructure
Database Replication	Sync on-premise DB to cloud DB
Incremental Migration	Move apps in batches
Rollback Plan	Immediate fallback to on-prem if issues occur

Migration Flow

Deploy cloud environment - Create the base cloud infrastructure (network, subnets, VMs, load balancer, storage, database, IAM roles, logging).
Replicate database - Synchronize the on-premise database with the cloud database so both contain the same data during migration.
Deploy application VMs - Install and configure the application on the cloud virtual machines.
Run staging validation - Test the application in the staging environment to verify functionality, performance, and connectivity.
Route partial traffic - Gradually direct a small percentage of user traffic to the cloud environment to monitor stability.
Full DNS switch - Update DNS records so all traffic is routed to the cloud infrastructure instead of the on-premise servers.

5. Cost Management Strategy

Method	Description
Auto-scaling	Scale VMs based on traffic
Reserved Instances	Reduce cost for predictable workloads
Storage Tiering	Move older data to cheaper storage
Monitoring	Identify unused resources
Environment Downsizing	Smaller infrastructure for staging

Environment Size Example

Resource	Staging	Production
Virtual Machines	2	4
Database	Medium	Large
Storage	Standard	High availability

6. Role of Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

FAQ

What is IaC?

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) means the infrastructure is defined in code files instead of being created manually in the cloud portal.
Tools such as Terraform enforce standards and automate deployments.

Where are the files located?

The infrastructure files are stored in a source control repository. Examples: Git repository, GitHub/GitLab/Azure DevOps, CI/CD pipeline

cloud-infrastructure/
├─ modules/
│   ├─ vm/
│   ├─ database/
│   ├─ load-balancer/
│   └─ storage/
├─ environments/
│   ├─ staging/
│   │   └─ main.tf
│   └─ production/
│       └─ main.tf
├─ variables.tf
└─ terraform.tfvars

Who makes the changes?

Infrastructure changes follow a software development workflow.

Role	Responsibility
Cloud Architect	Defines infrastructure standards
DevOps Engineers	Write Terraform modules
Cloud Engineers	Modify infrastructure configs
Reviewers	Approve pull requests

How the deployment works?

Deployment is usually automated.

Flow:

Developer commits code
Pipeline runs Terraform
Terraform compares desired state vs current infrastructure
Terraform creates/updates resources

Benefits

Benefit	Explanation
Consistency	Same infrastructure across all apps
Version Control	Infrastructure changes tracked in Git
Automation	One script deploys full environments
Compliance	Policies enforced automatically
Faster Deployments	Infrastructure in minutes

Example Terraform Concept

module "application_stack" {
  source = "./modules/app"

  app_name    = "billing"
  environment = "prd"
  vm_count    = 4
}

This would automatically create:

VMs
Load balancer
Database
Storage
Secrets
Logging

for each application.

Final Outcome

After implementation:

Metric	Result
Applications Migrated	500
Environments	Staging/Testing + Production
Infrastructure Management	Fully automated
Deployment Time	Reduced from days to minutes
Downtime	Near zero

For 500 applications, IaC ensures thousands of resources can be deployed consistently and safely.
People required for this kind of workplan: With ~30 engineers, completing migration in ~6 months becomes realistic.

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📝 ASSIGNMENT INSTRUCTIONS: Week 10 - Teach One Another: Infrastructure Standards

Purpose

Scenario

Tasks

📝 ASSIGNMENT RESOLUTION

1. Cloud Architecture Diagram

Architecture Flow

2. Naming Convention

Standard Pattern

Component Meaning

Examples

Benefits

3. Migration Timeline

Example Schedule (Optimistic)

4. Ensuring Zero Downtime

Migration Flow

5. Cost Management Strategy

Environment Size Example

6. Role of Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

FAQ

Benefits

Example Terraform Concept

Final Outcome