Automated Development Stack Management on Amazon Web Services; Cloud Competition

My capstone research is a description of my internship at M.C. Dean in the summer of 2022, where I worked as a DevOps intern to work on cloud infrastructure. The main problem I addressed is the need to automate aspects of a multi-account Amazon Web Services environment from a centralized place, which I solved using a systemic combination of several cloud technologies, including Lambda, S3, ECS, Docker, and Cloud Custodian. The system, when deployed, significantly simplifies the deployment of new automation policies, uptime schedules, and more. It was important to consider the human and social dimensions of this technology because of several factors. The most obvious one is that the system would be used by humans, and so the needs of the stakeholders were strong influences on how the system was developed. Additionally, the values and skills of the designers can also be seen, as my ideas of how the system should work shaped its setup in many ways, both good and bad. Additionally, the issue can be seen through an economic lens, as the purpose is to decrease costs. As a technical project, I believe that actor network theory can best be used to analyze the system. While I was the main actor involved in its actual development, I did not do it in a vacuum, and the system was influenced by everyone from my managers, AWS themselves, the developers of the technologies I used, and the requirements of the end-user. For my STS research into cloud competition, I plan to review literature related to the issue, as well as artifacts such as news stories, technologies offered, public statements, lawsuits, and more in order to describe the need for and risks to a free and fair cloud market. I expect to find that the market is at risk of becoming an oligopoly, and that action must be taken to ensure that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft do not end up with undue or compromising influence over the cloud economy, and therefore huge portions of other sectors. This ties in with my capstone research, in that as a user of the Cloud, I should be deliberately aware of how my actions and choices to adopt technologies fall into wider market trends and can serve to either combat or support oligopolistic actors in the cloud.

School of Engineering and Applied Science
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Technical Advisor: Briana Morrison
STS Advisor: Pedro Francisco