A Case Study of Gujarat Technological University.
About customer:
GTU is a state university with 486 affiliated college in its fold operating across the state of Gujarat through its five zones. The university caters to the fields of Engineering, Architecture, Pharmacy Management, Computer Science and has about 5,00,000+ students enrolled every year in a large number, in variety of courses such as Diploma, Under Graduate, Post Graduate programs along with doctorate program.
Challenges:
The large number of student enrollments in various programs every year eventually increases dynamic workload on department for submission, results and exam papers.
Also, an IT Department needs to scale vertically, based on their previous experiences and best predictions which therefore turns into over- provisioning. And manual scaling is always challenging and timely process which takes lots of skills and efforts.
Some of the major challenges for deploying GTU applications in AWS are shared, stable, elastic storage availability and Code Deploy to update .Net code in Windows EC2, Stateless Applications, Active Directory for all Auto scale windows EC2 and automatic registration with Active Directory.
Why AWS?
GTU determined that a public cloud service platform could deliver the needed and provide embedded solutions to their problems. As Amazon connect is a low-cost service and omni-channel cloud solution for IT helpdesk, admissions and other departments needing to provide inbound and outbound support.
Why Electromech?
To create a customized infrastructure that is more flexible and easier to use to scale up on-premises applications by migrating them to cloud when your server needs are low. Electromech Corporation has demonstrated success in providing specialized solutions aligning with AWS architectural best practices to help support teaching and learning, administration, and academic research efforts in education.
Partner Solution
Electromech had provided numerous solutions such as Auto scaling to provide dynamic responses, Migration in technology from horizontal scaling with auto scaling.
They had also introduced FSx to provide common storage for all auto-scale instance. Also created an active directory auto registration PowerShell script and the new images are maintained for all code updates.
AWS services that are used as part of solution is EC2 Windows to provide resizable compute capacity in the cloud, VPC to configure networking, access, and security environments, Security group which acts as a virtual firewall for your EC2 instances to control inbound and outbound traffic, Load balancer for your AWS applications.
Auto Scaling to build scaling plans that automate how groups of different resources respond to changes in demand, FSx to provide storage, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) a web service for securely controlling access to AWS resources.
CloudWatch to collect, access, and correlate this data on a single platform from across all your AWS resources, applications, and services, CloudTrail to enable governance, compliance, operational and risk auditing of your AWS account.
Some third-party applications or solutions which are used to build is Windows Active Directory on EC2, Native windows FTP service, PowerShell scripts.
Results and Benefits
Auto scaling provides excellent response to dynamic workload on demand with horizontal scaling of windows EC2, manual scaling is not required anymore. Due to Auto Scaling of windows instances, over provisioning does not occur and lots of cost can be saved with better user experience at peak load.
With the use of AWS FSx services common storage problems were resolved and the initial pilot run result was excellent. Special designed PowerShell script with Windows EC2 user data served the purpose and helped to achieve auto registration to Active Directory for new windows instances launched. All AWS and windows security best practices adopted so the solution is stable and secured.
GTU wants to replicate this architecture for their other existing windows workload in AWS. Further we have suggested introducing CodePipeline to improve the deployment process.