KickStream
AcademicAn elastic catalogue on AWS.
- Year
- 2026
- Role
- Academic project
- Context
- Cloud Computing
Technologies: AWS, Node.js, Express, DynamoDB, nginx, systemd
Overview
KickStream is an academic cloud computing project that implements a football match catalogue on an elastic AWS architecture. The goal was to exercise deployment and operation of a distributed application, not just its interface.
Instances bootstrap automatically through user data, run a Node.js API as a systemd service, and are replaceable by the Auto Scaling Group.
Architecture
Request flow
User
Application Load Balancer
distribution and health checks
EC2 Auto Scaling
elastic capacity
nginx
static + /api proxy
Static site
Express API
health check and catalogue
DynamoDB
| Component | Responsibility |
|---|---|
| Application Load Balancer | Traffic distribution and health checks |
| EC2 Auto Scaling Group | Elastic capacity and instance replacement |
| nginx | Static file serving and reverse proxy for the API |
| Node.js + Express | Health check and paginated catalogue queries |
| DynamoDB | Serverless persistence for the matches |
| systemd | API startup and supervision on each instance |
Technical decisions
- The API listens only on 127.0.0.1; nginx is the single exposed HTTP endpoint.
- AWS access uses the SDK default credential chain, allowing an IAM Role instead of keys in code.
- DynamoDB reads walk every page returned by Scan.
- The bootstrap installs dependencies, registers the service, and fails when the health check does not respond.
Scope
This is an academic infrastructure project. It does not include IaC to provision the ALB, Auto Scaling Group, security groups, or the DynamoDB table, and it is not presented as a public production service.