We met as a team several times to better detail our respective programming roles for the application as well as our integration plan. On implementation, we narrowed down and began work with NodeJS for our web framework, React.js for front-end served content, and Django Python for user simulation. We also worked together on some initial debugging of some aspects of the application that differ from tutorial bases.
We ran into some design concerns regarding the role of the front-end tier for the video data stream that goes from database to user (whether it is part of the chain or is circumvented). For now, we will keep it part of the chain as this will keep our data flow more regularized between nodes. However, we recognize a potential to change our VM choice for frontend nodes during the deployment stage accordingly. If front-end nodes handle a comparable load to the back-end, they may need to better match the capabilities of the backend.
Over the next two weeks, we plan to integrate our application-side work. We expect the minimum viable product will be a sufficiently complete environment to start implementing and creating testing modules for the traditional load balancing algorithm nodes.