Overview
Senior Capstone Project
by Zach Girouard
INTRODUCTION
As part of my senior capstone project for UNL, I helped to develop and design a cloud resource dashboard for the national construction company Kiewit. The cloud resource project, named CORGI, allows personnel at Kiewit to see their cloud resource usage displayed in different graphs and metrics. From there, users can chose to flag certain resources and downsize them, reducing their cloud costs and saving money.
MY TEAM
I worked with a small team of 5 other students, under the supervision of faculty who acted as our project manager, industry consultant, and grader. Every week, we met with our industry sponsors from Kiewit to discuss the progress of the project and receive feedback on our development and design of the web application.
EARLY DESIGNS
At the beginning of the project, our primary focus was to work with our industry sponsor to flesh out what the web application would look like. We began by interviewing our primary industry sponsor to get a better idea of who our typical user was. I wrote a series of questions such as:
"Is the user in a hurry when using this application or are they more intentional with their time?"
"How much experience and background information does the user have with cloud resources and their various nuances?"
"What setting is the user in when using this application (meeting, home, desk, etc.) ?"
After receiving answers to these questions, I created a Figma document where we collaborated on different preliminary designs for the web application. That document can be seen here:
FEEDBACK & KIEWIT DESIGN TEAM
After creating this high-fidelity prototype for our sponsor, we received very good initial feedback on the design, and they liked the direction we were going on. However, through more requirements elicitation and meetings with them, we decided that we could consolidate features such as the "forecast" page onto the dashboard and make the app less spread out over so many pages.
Around this same time, our sponsors informed us that Kiewit has their own design team and invited us to meet with them and gain access to their design library and components. We accepted and met with the design team where we talked more about how they like to structure their applications, and how we can use their components in our own application.
Additionally, I informally took up the role as design for the application, being the only person on my team to gain access to Kiewit's Figma design library. After gaining access, I made another prototype that modeled our initial design, with the improvements we talked about using Kiewit's design library. Screenshots from that design can be seen below. Due to security reasons, I can't share the working Figma prototype.
DEVELOPMENT
From there, we began actually developing the web application. The application itself is built using Vite + React JS, and pulls information from the CORGI API which provides us with information on VMs, SQL Databases, Disks, and more. The API also flags resources as underutilized if they fall below a certain threshold. We take this data and use Plotly JS to model it into different bar, line, and pie graphs depending on the type of data. Users are then able to click into these graphs to "drill down" on certain resources. We also display important metrics in Key Product Information (KPI) boxes which give the user a very brief overview of their spending and resources. Some of these KPI boxes display information such as:
Total Cost of Cloud Resources
Dollar Amount Change in Cost over One Week
Most Underutilized Resource
TBD
As of writing this, I have just finished the first-semester of this year long project. Next semester, we plan to develop the forecasting feature using a Tensor Flow ML model, add a wastefulness score for targeted resources, and possibly work on anomaly detection. I plan to update this project once we have more deliverables. Stay tuned!
© Zach Girouard 2024