Cloud Case Study : Online University

Mahatma Gandhi University Innovation Foundation

Mahatma Gandhi University Innovation Foundation (MGUIF) is a research and development body within Mahatma Gandhi University. Formed in 2019, MGU Innovation Foundation is a nonprofit Section 8 company under the Companies Act, 2013 (a Special Purpose Vehicle) functioning as a business innovation ecosystem of Mahatma Gandhi University.

MGU Innovation Foundation houses incubation in various core areas that would provide a new and emerging technology and compatible businesses in the fields of:

• 1. Core cloud computing for Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Cyber Security, IoT, Mobile and Web Apps, etc.,
• 2. Science and Engineering fields especially Automobile, Mechatronics, Robotics, Nano-Technology, Bioinformatics, and Drug Design.

MGUIF also provides consulting and managed services in various fields of IT by playing the role of a ‘Total Solution Provider’ to various Govt. entities.

In 2021, MGUIF collaborated with the Center for Online Education, MG University as an IT service provider to digitally deliver the undergraduate and postgraduate programs of MG University. MGUIF had to host a ‘Student Lifecycle Management’ application which had modules starting with admission programs, online classes, streaming video content, online quizzes, and practical assessments, online examinations, and valuations, fee collections, publishing the results to issuing the certificates over the web to several thousand online participants. The center needed an infrastructure capable of managing and delivering courses seamlessly & securely and had to be able to scale to accommodate the delivery of new courses and enable participant interaction with a limited budget to spend on infrastructure.

MGUIF chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) because of scalability, cost, features,high-availability, “We decided to go with AWS post analyzing similar CSP’s in parallel didn’t consider any other providers considering the support of tech team and services provided by AWS,” says Mr. Sanu Xavier, Chief Technology Officer, MGUIF.

MGUIF deploys the ‘Student Lifecycle Management’ application on web servers running on seven Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.

The platform uses the MariaDB database on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to index course information.

The figure below illustrates the university’s cloud architecture in AWS:

MGUIF was able to launch the production environment quickly, and efficiently within a fraction of the cost while considering the estimate to set up a similar on-premises infrastructure and at the same time enabling all of the security functionalities as per the required compliances and best practices.

• 1. Reduced administrative burden by using the Amazon RDS Command Line Interface, the AWS Management Console with API calls for easy access to production-ready relational databases.
• 2. Performance with the general purpose and supplied IOPS (SSD) storage.
• 3. Scalability with push-button computation, simple storage and read replica scaling.
• 4. With automated backups, database snapshots, multi-AZ deployments, and automatic host replacement, to increase availability and durability.
• 5. Security through network isolation and at-rest and in-transit encryption.
• 6. Governance of configurations, event notifications and manageability through metrics and monitoring.