Windows workloads, lifted onto AWS

About customer:

Gujarat Technological University is a premier academic and research institution which has driven new ways of thinking since its 2007 founding, established by the Government of Gujarat vide Gujarat Act No. 20 of 2007. Today, GTU is an intellectual destination that draws inspired scholars to its campus, keeping GTU at the nexus of ideas that challenge and change the world. GTU is a State University with 486 affiliated colleges in its fold operating across the state of Gujarat through its FIVE zones at Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar, Vallabh Vidyanagar, Rajkot and Surat. The University caters to the fields of Engineering, Architecture, Management, Pharmacy and Computer Science. The University has about 4,00,000 students enrolled in a large number of Diploma, Undergraduate, Post Graduate programs along with the robust Doctoral program.

GTU has emerged as an International Innovative University in its pursuit of bringing innovation and internationalization in professional education. Within a really short span it has achieved several national accolades for its endeavour in bringing excellence in professional education. GTU is a pioneer in introducing some innovative learning methodology like “Active Learning”, a classroom created online. The GTU Innovation Council is the most active and applauded for its work in the country engaged in training, developing and nurturing the young minds towards an ideology to innovate. GTU has the

largest International Experience Program in collaboration with the universities of US, Canada, China and Germany, which offer a unique opportunity to the students to enhance their capabilities and capacities in a global perspective.

Challenges:

• GTU developed more than 100+ applications, all of them are on AWS
• As such the overall students strength is 5,00,000+ and many applications require truly dynamic workload like Results, Submission, Exam Papers etc.
• Below are the challenges

1. Shared, stable and elastic storage availability
2. CodeDeploy to update .Net code in windows EC2
3. Stateless applications
4. Active Directory for all AutoScale windows EC2
5. Windows EC2 automatic registration with Active Directory.

• The IT department needs to scale vertically based on their previous experience and best predictions. This many times turns into over provisioning.
• Manual Scaling is always challenging and requires skill resources availability and some downtime.

Solution:

• Horizontal scaling with Auto Scaling so no special skill or resources are required.
• FSx is introduced to provide common storage for all Auto Scale instances.
• Active Directory auto registration powershell script created.
• New images are maintained for all code updates.

Architecture Diagram:

Outcomes

• Auto scaling provides excellent response to dynamic workload on demand with horizontal scaling of windows EC2, so manual scaling is not required.
• 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. It is working as per expectation in Production also.
• Special designed PowerShell script with Windows EC2 user data served the purpose and helped us 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.

Conclusion

• GTU has achieved autoscaling as per their requirement, to match their daily dynamic workloads.
• They are also replicating this architecture for their other existing windows workload in AWS.