AWS Hosted Chatroom

Our AWS Architecture

Inspiration

Audvy is AWS Cloud Practitioner Certified, and October has made several chat rooms in the past, so it was easy to combine the two skillsets into one project

What it does

It's a text based chat room that uses a MariaDB database to hold the sent messages, allowing the backlog to persist beyond the server program's runtime

How we built it

Audvy set up the AWS Architecture and October programmed the server and client programs

Challenges we ran into

We faced some initial trouble hosting a DB on AWS RDS, so we decided to host the database on an EC2 instance.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to figure out a way to host a database on an AWS EC2 instance and how to access it from a java program. In addition we managed to setup an alarm system to allow for the vertical scaling of our EC2 Instances when demand increases.

What we learned

We learned how to allow connections to the MariaDB instance from IPs beyond localhost; How to deploy applications on AWS EC2; How to setup CloudWatch Alarms and SNS;

What's next for Chat room

We aren't sure if this project will continue development, as hosting the database isn't free so any downtime would be spilling money out of Audvy's wallet