Design and cost a complete architecture for one brief

capstone · 120 min · Objective 1.8

Task

Pull the whole of Cloud Architecture into one design. Take a single brief and produce the deployment model, the network, the compute and data shapes, the optimisation decisions and the monthly cost -- with every choice traced to a stated requirement rather than to preference.

Steps

  1. Write the brief in lab/capstone/brief.md: a business with a stated user base, a stated peak, a stated data volume, one regulatory constraint and one budget constraint. Make the constraints conflict slightly, because real ones do.
  2. Produce lab/capstone/design.md covering: service and deployment model with the driver; the address plan and subnet layout across zones; the connectivity method to any on-premises component; the compute shape including instance family and scaling approach; the data stores chosen by access pattern; and where containers or orchestration are and are not used.
  3. Produce lab/capstone/costing.csv with a line per component, a monthly figure, and a column naming the optimisation applied -- right-sizing, a commitment, a storage tier, a lifecycle rule or switching something off outside working hours.
  4. Produce lab/capstone/traceability.csv mapping every design decision to the requirement that drove it. Any decision with no requirement is either unnecessary or the requirement was never written down; resolve each one.
  5. Write a final page naming the two decisions you are least confident about, what evidence would settle them, and which CompTIA objective each belongs to.

Verify

for f in brief design costing traceability; do test -s lab/capstone/$f.* && echo "$f ok"; done
awk -F, 'NR>1 && NF>=3 {n++} END {print n" costed component(s)"}' lab/capstone/costing.csv
awk -F, 'NR>1 && NF>=2 {n++} END {print n" traced decision(s)"}' lab/capstone/traceability.csv
grep -Eci 'egress|transfer' lab/capstone/costing.csv
grep -Eci 'zone' lab/capstone/design.md

Every file present, at least eight costed components and at least twelve traced decisions. A costing with no data-transfer line has missed the charge that most often surprises people, which is the whole point of objective 1.8.

Notes

The conflicting constraints are deliberate. A brief where every requirement points the same way tests nothing: the skill this domain examines is choosing when two acceptable options exist and one requirement has to be treated as mandatory.

This is an independent study companion for CompTIA Cloud+ CV0-004 and is not produced by or endorsed by CompTIA.