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Team Status Report for 2/19

We met up as a team to come up with more specific metrics for our use case requirements. In order to meet these use case requirements, we had to flesh out video specs (1080p 60fps 8-12 min), video obtainment (Youtube Creative Commons), the type of VM we would use (AWS EC2 T4g, T3, H1), end-user simulation (varying video watching behavior), and load balancing algorithms (round-robin, CPU decider, response-based UCB1).

In the upcoming week, we hope to obtain our AWS credits to be able to test the connectivity of our server architecture. Assuming this goes well, we will then move on to building and deploying the video web application without our customizable load balancer.

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Team Status Report for 2/12

In preparing for the presentation this week, we finalized specific benchmarks that we want to meet with our capstone project as well as the technological suite we intend to use in order to meet those requirements. Drafting the Gantt chart will also help in knowing what to do exactly in the coming weeks. Mitul has already requested the AWS credits for our project, and it is not possible to proceed with the implementation before we obtain the credits.

For this coming week, we plan to refine our design for the project for the design presentation, researching the specifics of our web application design, architecture design, and the first few algorithms we will be testing with our load balancer. Assuming we receive the AWS credits early, we can also start implementing our prototype server architecture using AWS.

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Jason’s Status Report for 2/12

This week, I mainly worked on the project proposal presentation before it was presented by Mitul to the section. In particular, I filled in the slides explaining the basics of multi-tiered architecture and load balancers as these are the foundations of our project that enables us to test different load balancing algorithms.

Another item on the presentation I was responsible for was the Gantt chart. I found it very helpful in dividing the daunting scale of the full project to much more manageable smaller tasks. It also helps in realizing the specifics of each step in the project. We now have a very clear timeline of who to do what when until the end of the semester very early on in the project.

Finally, when we encountered the technical challenge of having to simulate users to put a non-trivial load on the servers, I looked into and proposed various solutions such as running scripts on our own devices as well as maybe using the ECE clusters or more ec2 instances from AWS in order for similar purposes.