- The situation at Northbank
- Your role and the brief
- Environment and starter stack
Move a loan document store onto private AWS networking
Northbank keeps 1.2 million scanned loan documents on one EC2 instance and a public S3 bucket. Rebuild it as a two-AZ VPC with a private application tier and KMS-encrypted storage reached over a gateway endpoint, in Terraform you can destroy and stand up again, and finish with the evidence an internal auditor asks for.
PCREATED BYPrepmeetsProject studio, Prepmeets
THE CHALLENGE → YOUR OUTCOME
Real context. Work that matters.
Northbank needs its loan documents off a single public-facing instance before its next internal audit, without a migration window longer than a Saturday morning. You rebuild the hosting as a private two-tier VPC in Terraform, move the objects behind a customer-managed key and a gateway endpoint, prove the service survives losing an instance, and hand back a stack the next engineer can read.
What’s at stake
Your responsibility: Work as the cloud engineer, infrastructure team—investigate the requirements, implement your approach and verify the result.The document store was built in a fortnight in 2021 so advisers could stop emailing PDFs to each other. One EC2 instance in a default VPC serves a small internal web app; the scans sit in an S3 bucket that was made public because a presigned URL "did not work" late on a Friday. It has run without incident since, which is exactly why nobody has touched it.
Success means: Loan documents reachable only from the application tier, encrypted with a key Northbank controls, on infrastructure that survives the loss of an instance or an availability zone, with the whole stack reproducible from the repository and an evidence pack that answers the auditor’s three questions directly. Explain the decisions and checks behind your implementation.
WHAT YOU’LL BUILD
01AWS
02Terraform
03VPC
Northbank loan document store
INCLUDED WITH YOUR PROJECT
A workspace, not just a document.
Your brief, a Jira-style task board and an interview studio—all in one place.
A look inside your workspace
Start with the full project brief
Build step by step Track your progress Own your interview story
Know where you’re heading.
- 01The situation at Northbank
- 02Your role and the brief
- 03Environment and starter stack
- 04Target architecture
- 05Build it in four phases
- 06Break it on purpose
- 07What you hand over
- 08Submission and cleanup
Practise explaining your decisions
Which decision mattered most in your solution, and how did you verify it?
Use your own implementation to connect Situation, Task, Action and Result into one interview story.
Before you begin · tools & running costs
Prerequisites: Your own accounts and access to Terraform 1.9, Amazon VPC, Amazon S3 with KMS, CloudWatch Logs and metrics.
Additional costs: Cloud and tool usage in your own accounts may incur charges. Set a budget and clean up after testing.
Work in your own accounts and repositories. Never share credentials or confidential data.
What’s included
Project brief, target-design guidance, assigned tasks, resource guidance and interview prompts. Detailed requirements become part of your purchased workspace.
P
MEET YOUR PROJECT EXPERT
Prepmeets
Project studio, PrepmeetsWe are the team that builds Prepmeets. Between us we have run cloud platforms, delivery pipelines, analytics teams and AI governance programmes in banks, hospitals, retailers and government departments, and these projects are the work we used to hand to new joiners in their first fortnight. Every one of them is a real scenario with the client’s name changed, scoped to a week of evenings, and reviewed by the person who originally did the job.
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