Welcome to part two of our AWS Certified Architect Professional course. In part one we took a look at the various AWS services and IT terminology that is important for us to understand. In this part of the course we will design solutions for a fictitious company based on a problem statement. Let's start our discussion by introducing the fictitious company called ACME Printing. ACME Printing is company that handles local outsourced 3D printing.

Currently, a customer emails a 3D plan to an email inbox. A client service representative, or CSR, who is responsible for managing the inbox, extracts the 3D plan from the email message along with any special instructions written in the email.

If the customer has an account and the billing information on file is out of date, the CSR will reach out to the customer by phone or email in order to update the billing information. Assuming the account has no outstanding balance, the CSR passes the 3D plans and instructions along to the print operator.

Next, the print operator reviews the plans and the quantity to come up with a quote and/or questions. This information is reported back to the CSR who seeks approval from the customer or gets clarifications for the questions.

If the customer approves the quote and all questions are answered sufficiently, then the print operator prints the plans in the correct quantity. Upon completion of the print job, the print operator packages up the materials and notifies the CSR. The CSR contacts the in-house courier by phone or text message to schedule a delivery.

The courier picks up the materials and delivers it to the customer. Finally, the CSR marks this 3D order as complete and the total amount for the job is charged to the customer.

The entire workflow is managed via spreadsheets. This is an interesting company with many areas of their process that we can improve. Thankfully we have been hired to do just that. Here's what we've been asked to do. ACME Printing wants to grow the business. They do not believe that the current process can handle the anticipated growth. However, they do not want to implement a fully baked solution right away due to cost.

They want to break up the new solution into three phases. In Phase 1 our goal is to remove as much of the manual process as we can without impacting the customers.

Phase 2 requires that we implement a website for customers to manage their orders and accounts. The last phase is meant to expand the business by introducing a mobile application that can be used to take pictures of an object in order to build a 3D model.

Throughout the project, the recurring costs must be kept at a minimum, the process must be available with little to no downtime and security must follow best practices. ACME Printing does not want to run its own infrastructure nor do they have the money to do so. They do not have an AWS account, but are willing to start one based on our recommendation.

And there we have it, in the next three lessons we are going to break down each phase into its own lesson. We will look at possible solutions and choose the best approach that is within the stated constraints. Up first, we will look at Phase 1 of our ACME printing solution.