Assignment Task

Scenario

Monmouth Holiday Rentals is a new co$-$operative that runs a number of holiday lets

in the seaside town of Monmouth$-$On$-$Sea, in the South$-$West of England. The

properties for rent include whole houses and apartments, as well as individual rooms

in shared houses.

The co$-$operative has been created by a group of friends who currently use a popular website for short$-$term lets to rent their properties. They were dissatisfied with the high costs of this service, and to reduce these costs, they have decided to create their own web presence where they can rent out their properties directly $($and eventually access a wider range of booking channels such us booking.com, expedia etc$).$

There are currently five members in the co$-$operative, who currently make decisions jointly. Between them, they have $18$ properties for rent. They hope that if the initiative is successful, they will be able to persuade other property owners in the town to join them. They estimate that there are over $50$ potential owners and more than $300$ properties, that may eventually join the co$-$operative.

The main drive of the co$-$operative is to reduce costs, so as to keep prices low and

still make a decent profit. For this reason, they have decided to use a free, open

source Property Management System $($PMS$)$ that they will host themselves on a cloud server.

They would like a system that, once set up$,$ can be easily used by the members to

manage their reservations $($e$.$g$.$ set availability and prices, answer queries, check

guests in$/$out etc$).$ The system should also be able to cope with there is lot of demand in the summer months, where properties are nearly fully booked all through the months of July and August, but in winter the occupancy can be as low as $5\%.$

They have approached you to advise on how to implement such a system, as well a

the ongoing maintenance and security that will be required.

Part $1$ Design and Implement a cloud$-$based infrastructure

Your task is to investigate, implement and demonstrate a cloud$-$based infrastructure that can be used to host the PMS$.$ You need to research the typical resources that are needed for typical open$-$source self$-$hosted cloud$-$based PMS to help decide what cloud resources and configurations may be needed. You should then implement an appropriate virtual machine $($VM$),$ install an appropriate operating system $($OS$)$ and create and configure any other cloud services needed for the solution. You are not required to implement and deploy a fully operational PMS; you should implement as much of the underlying infrastructure as possible with the resources that are available to you, making note of any configuration and settings you have decided, and any additional steps that may be needed for a fully operational solution so that you can make appropriate recommendations to the co$-$operative.