nathan-d / emea-build-hackday

A single page application to score build complexity for AWS solutions

EMEA Build Hackday

Overview

The inaugural hackday for the FAWS EMEA Build team is intended to achieve the following:

• Increase team exposure to the AWS platform around key but infrequently touched technologies
• Provide a centralised (non-Excel) alternative for Simple Build calculations with support for versioning

There are two main components to the hackday, the serverless application and the supporting AWS infrastrcuture. Groups should be created to work on each of these areas with owners agreed for each of the distinct tasks that come out of the design session.

The suggested agenda for the day is:

• 09:00 - Google Campus opens its doors.
• 09:15 - Beverages are secured and hackday project discussion and design start.
• 10:00 11:00 - Russell arrives and buys everyone drinks as penance.
• 12:00 - Lunch of some sort (facilities uncertain) and regroup.
• 13:00 - Back at it for further awesomeness.
• 16:00 - Wrap-up with final update from team.
• 16:30 - Drinks

Working Structure

To ensure we're all working in roughly the same way the following is recommended:

1. Ideas for discussion, development, or change, should be raised as issues on the GitHub repository
2. Branches should be created for each issue and issues should focus on distinct elements of functionality
3. Each engineer or group (Where paired coding) should work in a branch and never in master
4. Pull requests should be used to merge branches into the master branch
5. All supporting documentation for this project should exist in the repository

Project Goals

• To produce a Single Page Application (SPA) to replace the existing Excel spreadsheet
• Allow the SA community to get instant feedback on build complexity
• Support submission of simple build score, product breakdown, and customer details
• Provide notification functionality to allow for build team notifciation on submission
• Act as a reference serverless architecture for the team

Suggested next steps

The below can be viewed as discussion points for the design session or as a check list during development.

Application

• Add submission functionality to Application
• Architecture review should support colours coding as per the Excel documentation
• Improvide review page with visualisation component
• Use Rackspace's Canon styling framework

Infrastructure

• Agree AWS products required to support the functionality outlined in the Project Goals
• Using software of your choice create an architectural design
• Decide on API structure to support the application functionality
• Agree Lambda functions to be created and the functionality they are intended to support
• Decide if a datastore is required and if so which one
• Which notification solutions are best fit for the Project Goals and what third party integrations would add value?

Reference

• AWS Zombie Lambda Workshop
• Rackspace Canon Framework
• GraphQL

emea-build-hackday's Issues

Rework lambda function

The python lambda function created during the hackday needs some refactoring to make it a little more defensive in its queue processing and include proper error handling.

Import product data from LucidChart

LucidChart's graphs API will allow us to see what products are being used in each infrasturcture design.

https://www.lucidchart.com/pages/api_graph

Worth looking into at some point.

Add scoring functionality to application

The application should support the scoring functionality currently available in the excel document.

Requirements

• Support scoring system as found in the Excel document
• Display the selected services and processed score prior to submission
• Use colour coding (Green, Amber, Red) for service groups

We need to Add in the AWS Spend into the Calc

Field to be added for AWS Spend to this page only spends < $4k can proceed.

Successful submissions should create JIRA cards

We should investigate if its possible to create new JIRA cards on the successful submission of a Simple Build.

To ensure this drops into the Simple Builds JIRA swimlane the card will need the respective label added.

Progress bar should be persistent in all form views

The progress bar only exists in the context of the customer form at this point. If this is intended for use in application it should be present in the parent form with progress tied to form component rather than in the form component itself.

Create infrastructure architecture diagram

As a team create a architectural document to work from.

Application should support uploading of HLP document

To remove the need for the SA/SE emailing the build team we should look to add support for the uploading of HLP documents via the form.

HLP documents should be uploaded to a private S3 bucket and a reference added to the DynamoDB row.

Form validation

Our form fields don't perform any validation. We should add in the following:

• Field content type validation
• Handle account validation and checks in the backend
  • Perform notification actions where a submission was against an invalid account, etc.

AWS services data should be pulled from the API

As suggested by @Fresno16 - we should pull the services score and associated data from the database on form load. We can do this by exposing this data via an API endpoint.

Note that the form should be able to handle latency gracefully and the inability to access the endpoint by notifying the user.

Selecting item results in broken styling

Selecting a product results in a pretty catastrophic styling break.

Lambda function for form processing

We should add a lambda function to process the form data, removing unnecessary fields, and submitting it to DynamoDB.

Form submission

Our application's submission functionality is currently just a stub. This functionality needs to be added.

AWS spend field is reusing SA variable

Looks like the spend field is reusing a field rather than having it own.

Lambda function needs to support new data structure

See issue #23 for data structure change issue. We'll need to traverse another level down to find the selected key value.

Racker Authentication

We should support Racker authentication via RSA tokens.

Cloudformation all the things

Now we've got the project working and build via the console, lets make it work with Cloudformation. This will allow the project to be reused as a demo and for other initiatives.

Review pane needs to hide sections without selected services

The review pane is pretty basic. We need to hide sections that don't have any selected services.

Add favicon

We should drop in a nice FAWS or Rackspace favicon as a web apps asset.

Add notification functionality

On successful processing of a Simple Builds message we should perform the following notification actions:

1. Send an email to the build team and the submitting SA stating the build has been successfully submitted and should be reviewed by a build engineer.
2. Notify the submitting SA where the submissions failed validation checks as per issue #18 (If we implement this feature).
3. Send a Slack message to the FAWS Build Team channel.