IT 423 Module Four Activity Guidelines and Rubric

Overview

Many organizations and IT professionals use cloud services to launch a site because of the cost-benefit and time savings. Not only does it usually take only one professional to set up, but it can be easily preconfigured and deployed. For this activity, you will launch a site on an EC2 instance.

By applying this knowledge, you can launch a website on a virtual machine. To prepare for this activity, log on to your AWS Academy Learner Lab course and access the AWS Console.

As a friendly reminder, you should strive to use the free-tier services in the console whenever possible (even if you have remaining credits on your account).

For the purposes of this activity, imagine that your project manager has tasked you with setting up a test environment for the new company blog, where the rest of the development team can create a demo for review. Instead of providing a hardware server, they wish to use the cloud. Since you have no prior experience with setting up a WordPress site on an EC2 instance in AWS, they have provided a tutorial (the tutorial is attached below) for you to complete this task. WordPress is a commonly used content management system.

Prompt

For this activity, you will:

Set up an EC2 instance and install all the proper components by following the tutorial. Take screenshots to show your work.

Answer the following questions in a typed reflection:

Comparison: How does this process differ from traditional in-house server creation? Consider costs, speed, and security.

Advantages: Given the quick turnaround in technology, how can the company take advantage of EC2 instances in its testing environments?

• Improvement: Was the tutorial easy to follow? What issues did you run into? What are some possible improvements you would give for the EC2 setup process?
• After installing WordPress on your EC2 instance and working through the setup, take screenshots to show your work, and answer the following:

Admin Tools: What are three of the included admin tools (listed on the left side menu in the admin panel) in a base setup, and how can they be used to manage content on your site?

• Plug-Ins: How are plug-ins used within WordPress and, other than phpMyAdmin, what plug-in is useful for data management? How is it useful?