Week 10

653 words · 4 min read

Summary

3/16 - 3/22

Meetings

• Spring Break

Accomplishments

• Cloud Assignment Part 1

Cloud Assignment Part 1

Cloud Assignment Part 1 is ready for release on Tuesday 3/24, it will be due Sunday 3/29 at 11:59PM.

Part 2 will be ready for release on Saturday 3/28, it will be due Friday 4/3 at 11:59PM.

Cloud Assignment Part 1 introduces students to

• Docker Compose and has them write a Dockerfile for a reverse proxy, Nginx.
• Container Registries and has them create one using ECR.
• Ansible and has them fill in required values to automate the Nginx deploy.
• Terraform where they have to import the manually creating resources so they can manage them using Infrastructure-as-Code.
• REST APIs and DNS, which they use to create a personal domain name for their deployed application.

Planning out the rest of the semester

We don’t have many weeks left in the semester. I’d like to discuss the final deliverables for my Senior Project so I can manage my time effectively across all my courses.

Confirmed Deliverables:

• Cloud Assignment 3
• Cloud Assignment 4

Unconfirmed Deliverables:

• Cloud Assignment handoff
• Instructional Website maintenance
• Research Paper

Cloud Assignment 3

Plan complete, assignment in progress.

Cloud Assignment 4.

Plan in-progress, group assignment where students deploy a vibe-coded application to a Kubernetes cluster.

Cloud Assignment handoff

I’d like to discuss how we’ll perform the handoff to whoever will run the Cloud Assignments next course session.

Instructional Website maintenance

I’d like to discuss who will maintain the instructional website after I’m gone.

Research Paper

I’d like to discuss what we might publish, and whether that paper should be delivered during the semester or during the summer.

Authoring Cloud Assignments

A concern raised in previous meetings was the method by which I author Cloud Assignments. Initially, I would edit assignment markdown documents in vim and run an Astro dev server in another terminal, allowing me to preview the rendered assignment in a web page. Obviously, this requires the writer being comfortable working from the command line in a typical software engineering workflow. It was suggested that Obsidian is a convenient GUI for editing markdown documents, and is familiar to existing instructional staff.

I’ve created a custom Obsidian plugin for authoring Cloud Assignments, letting a preview sit side-by-side an editing pane. It integrates directly with the instructional site, and you are able to authenticate against the instructional site within the plugin.

Features:

• HTML preview that updates as you write the assignment text.
• preview tracks where you are editing the markdown document.
• markdown text and images are synced between obsidian vaults and the instructional site.
• can push and pull versioned updates.
• can create releases for a particular assignment.

This is the first step towards a user-friendly platform for authoring Cloud Assignments.

Enabling e-mail for the Instructional Site

The Instructional Site is still stuck in the SES sandbox, and is unlikely to get approved for production access. I spent a few days trying to get the approval to go through.

In an effort to get the approval, I implemented:

• bounce/complaint handling through an SNS webhook pipeline
• send suppression to avoid sending emails to address that bounced/complained
• email tracking to audit sends in the application
• a privacy policy and terms of service
• compliant email templates
• email authentication using SPF/DKIM/DMARC

I clearly outlined our use case, but it was still denied. The reasons for the denial were likely:

• no public-facing content on the website, just a login page
• the magic-link logins resemble phishing attempts
• cs351.cloud is a new domain with no reputation on a new TLD
• earlier denials made subsequent approvals more difficult to achieve

There are a few paths forward, both of which require addressing the above issues.

• use a different email sender (e.g. Postmark) instead of SES
• add all students to the SES sandbox
• move the infrastructure to a different AWS account and go through the SES approval process again.

The first option is more practical, but encumbers the instructional site with additional services to depend on. The second option requires students click an email link within 24 hours and is subject to aggressive rate-limits. The third option is a sizable manual effort, with no guarantee that we will be approved.

We will have to discuss the trade-offs. For now, students will continue to use Gradescope to work on Cloud Assignment 3 .