ShopEase E-Commerce Platform Modernization

Background: ShopEase, a rapidly growing e-commerce company, is facing challenges with its legacy online store platform. Their current system struggles to handle increasing traffic volumes, especially during peak shopping seasons, resulting in slowdowns and occasional outages. Moreover, security concerns have arisen regarding customer data protection and the risk of cyber attacks.

Objectives:

• Enhanced Security: Safeguard sensitive customer data, including payment information and personal details, from breaches and cyber attacks.
• Scalability: Ensure the platform can seamlessly accommodate increasing customer traffic and transaction volumes, particularly during peak sales periods.
• Improved Reliability: Minimize downtime and ensure uninterrupted availability of the online store, providing a consistently positive customer experience.

Current Issues:

• Performance Bottlenecks: The current platform experiences slow response times and occasional outages under heavy traffic, leading to frustrated customers and lost sales opportunities.
• Security Vulnerabilities: Concerns exist regarding potential data breaches and the platform's susceptibility to cyber attacks, jeopardizing customer trust and potentially leading to financial losses.
• Limited Scalability: The existing infrastructure struggles to scale efficiently to handle sudden spikes in traffic, hindering the company's growth and expansion plans.

Solution:

To overcome these challenges, ShopEase is migrating its e-commerce platform to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). By leveraging GCP's robust infrastructure, security features, and scalability, ShopEase aims to achieve the following:

• Enhanced Performance: Utilize GCP's powerful computing resources and load balancing capabilities to deliver a fast and responsive online shopping experience, even during peak traffic periods.
• Multi-layered Security: Employ GCP's security services like Cloud Armor and IAM to safeguard customer data and protect against cyber threats.
• Seamless Scalability: Leverage GCP's autoscaling and managed services to dynamically adjust resources based on demand, ensuring the platform can handle future growth and expansion.

To achieve these goals, I followed the detailed project plan below:

Phase 1: Architecture Design and Planning

1. Create the VPC (Virtual Private Cloud): In the GCP console, I navigated to "VPC network" -> "VPC networks" and clicked "Create VPC network". Named the VPC, choose a region (consider latency and compliance), and set an automatic IP range.

2. Create Subnets: Within the VPC, I created subnets. For example, a separate subnet for web servers (e.g., 10.0.1.0/24), application servers (e.g., 10.0.2.0/24), and databases (e.g., 10.0.3.0/24).

3. Create a Cloud NAT Gateway: I navigated to "VPC Network" -> "NAT" and clicked "Create NAT gateway." I filled in the information as applicable and created a new Cloud Router.

4. Define Firewall Rules: I defined firewall rules for each subnet. For example, allowing traffic on port 80 and 443 to the web server subnet from the internet, but restricting access to the application and database subnets. Below are a few of the firewall rules I created and the last screenshot shows all the rules created.

5. Create a Cloud Armor Security Policy: In the "Network Security" section, I created a new Cloud Armor security policy. I provided an example of adding rules to the policy in the third screenshot below. You can use pre-configured rule sets (e.g., "OWASP Top 10") or create custom rules based on IP, geo-location, request headers, etc. For example, create a rule to block requests that match a known SQL injection pattern.

6. Establish Security Baseline: IAM (Identity and Access Management): Created service accounts for the application components (e.g., one for web servers, one for the database) by navigating to "IAM & Admin" and "Service Accounts", then "Create Service Account". Granted each service account only the necessary permissions (least privilege).

Phase 2: GCP Infrastructure Setup

1. Set up Cloud VPN (High Availability VPN) Created a Cloud VPN gateway in the VPC. Set up a compatible VPN gateway on ShopEase's on-premises network, created a VPN connection between the two gateways. Configured IPsec (Internet Protocol Security) parameters and routing options.

Note: Admittingly, this is the section where I encountered issues, when trying to add the peer VPN gateway and use the two interface IP addresses that I was provided. I also realized because I originally created the Cloud Router as regional, it would not work and I'd have to create a new router.

Note: Although I could not successfully create the Cloud VPN (will revisit in a following project), I continued on to Phase 3..

Phase 3: Application Migration and Security Hardening

1. Application Deployment: Created virtual machines (VMs) in the VPC to host the application components.

2. Create Instance Groups for Web Servers: In the GCP console, went to "Compute Engine" -> "Instance groups". Clicked "Create instance group". Group type: Selected "Managed instance group" for automatic scaling and management. Instances: Added the existing web server instances. Autoscaling (optional): Configured autoscaling policies to automatically add or remove instances based on demand.

Note: In order to create a managed instance group for the web servers, it was required to create an instance template to define the configuration of the virtual machines. Managed Instance Groups (MIGs) uses the instance template to create and manage identical VM instances.

3. Create Load Balancer: Used a HTTP/HTTPS Load Balancer to distribute traffic to the web servers for high availability and scalability. Required creating a backend service and attaching the instance group that was just created. In the GCP console, navigated to "Network Services" -> "Load Balancing" and clicked "Create load balancer."

4. Attach Cloud Armor Security Policy: To attach the previously created Cloud Armor edge security policy to backend associated with the load balancer, I had to edit the backend service.

Although not shown, the last part of the project plan included configuring logging and monitoring by following the below steps:

5. Cloud Logging and Monitoring Setup:

Logging:

• Enable: Go to "Logging" in the GCP console and enable logging for each service to monitor (e.g., Compute Engine, Cloud SQL).
• Sinks: Create log sinks to export logs to a Cloud Storage bucket, BigQuery dataset, or Pub/Sub topic for further analysis.

Monitoring:

• Dashboards: Create custom dashboards in Cloud Monitoring to visualize metrics.
• Alerting: Set up alerting policies based on thresholds for key metrics. You'll receive notifications (e.g., email, SMS) when alerts are triggered.
• Uptime checks: Create uptime checks to monitor the availability of the application from various locations

Conclusion: Thank you all for taking the time to review my project plan for ShopEase's application migration to GCP. I've thoroughly enjoyed delving into the complexities of migrating an application to GCP, and I hope you found the journey as informative and engaging as I did.