Modern Computing Paradigms: Mobile Applications and Infrastructure as Code

The computing world is constantly changing and requires the use of new technologies to solve emerging world problems. This thesis specifically looks at how to apply two new technologies, mobile computing and infrastructure as code, to address the issue of crumbling structures in Haiti and the provisioning of virtual machines for collaborative team work.An Android mobile application was created and will be tested during the summer of 2013 by a small group of engineering students in Ecuador, Uganda, and Costa Rica. The application will eventually be used in Haiti to guide a Haitian citizen through an assessment to obtain data that civil engineering experts will later use to construct a structural model and identify areas at risk of collapse. DevOps is a general movement from a traditional development approach to an agile approach. Within this movement, exists a methodology known as infrastructure as code that focuses on how the infrastructure is created, automatically provisioned and maintained. A provisioning language, Puppet, is used to provision a virtual or physical machine with specified configuration settings. A benefit of this approach is the developers, testers, and system administrators all work on identical computing environments.