Case Study | Cloud Hosting with AWS
Leveraging Cloud Hosting to Increase Business Sustainability, Efficiency & Enable Growth
Published: 23 March 2023
Akademia is a comprehensive private, non-profit, tertiary education institution providing dynamic and innovative learning opportunities. The institution is committed to excellence in higher education which is executed utilizing the latest teaching methods and technological advancements. The courses are designed to equip students with the latest tools, knowledge, and skills required for success alongside fostering excellence in research and development.
Akademia's Business Challenge & Goals
Akademia had sought to migrate their learning management system (LMS) to the cloud. The changing academic climate, alongside student needs, further pushed Akademia to find ways to innovate for long-term success. Aligned with their commitment to the scholars as well as business growth, the education institution strategically chose to migrate their LMS to the cloud in order to leverage higher availability and scalability.
Akademia had been using Moodle, an open-source LMS, due to its comprehensive features. Moodle’s features and benefits include:
- The ability to adapt quickly using first- and third-party plug-ins to expand capabilities and features, such as proctoring, class presentations, and exam monitoring.
- Flexibility, enabling Akademia to adapt the platform the changing business needs as well as the needs of their students.
- Customisation capabilities to tailor the platform to suite specific branding requirements.
- Ease of integration with other business functions such as HR, talent management, compliance, and payment processing, meaning that Akademia can grow the portals use case over time.
- Content management features supporting all latest eLearning standards. Moreover, it enables the upload of documents as well as videos, increasing efficiency for students and staff.
- Reporting and tracking tools to analyze exam performance as well as tracks learners’ progress.
As an innovative institution, Akademia understood that the LMS would require a modern hosting solution in order to meet the fluctuating needs of it’s users. These demands required that the LMS work effectively and as intended, delivering elasticity, with automated scaling over periods of high traffic, such as exam time. Moreover, Akademia required a robust solution that delivered redundancy while being simple enough to be operated by technical academic staff on a daily basis.
Tangent’s AWS Cloud Solution
Tangent Solutions strategically devised an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud hosting solution that could be supported by technical academic staff alongside Tangent when more in-depth knowledge was required. Tangent built the necessary infrastructure on the AWS cloud, including the deployment of virtual machines, databases, caching, backups, and networking.
Additionally, Tangent leveraged DevOps methodologies underpinned by the Well-Architected Framework (WAF) within the AWS environment.
This combination delivered a cloud-native application that ensured resilience, scalability, redundancy and usability. Importantly, the following technologies were utilised in the delivery of this solution:
- AWS EC2 virtual machines
- Amazon Aurora for PostgreSQL
- Amazon EC2 Autoscaling
- Amazon Elasticache
- AWS Backup
- Amazon CloudFormation
- Amazon CloudWatch
Following best practices, the solution included automated backups, allowing for recent recovery point availability. Moreover, through the implementation of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) utilising CloudFormation, Tangent facilitated the automated provisioning of infrastructure. This implementation ensures the cloud can also be monitored, managed, and adjusted for periods of high use.
The Outcome of Tangent's Cloud Hosting Solution
As a result, Akademia could quickly review, transform, and update the infrastructure as needed. The automated scaling ensured the available capacity changed with fluctuations in load, thereby ensuring that the Moodle deployment was optimised from a cost perspective. Furthermore, Managed Service Support provided an extra layer of support when Akademia required additional assistance in the maintenance and improvement of the Moodle environment.
Akademia was able to provide a reliable LMS solution to their students with secure and easily accessible backups. The elastic and highly-available solution which followed best practices was instrumental in delivering a successful learning management system to Akademia’s clients.
The user experience was also improved as the system was able to handle increased traffic, backups were readily available, and the burden on the Akademia to manage infrastructure was minimised.
- Akademia has been able to provide a LMS solution to their students.
- Enabled secure and easily accessible backups.
- Elastic and highly available solution with redundancy was implemented.
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