Case Study

Online Campus based on AWS

Universidad IEU

Amazon Amplify

About IEU

Universidad IEU is a Mexican university with more than 44 years of existence, offering more than 150 educational programs including high school, bachelor`s, master`s and doctoral degrees, in face-to-face, online and executive modalities to thousands of students throughout the Mexican Republic with the international support of Galileo Global Education.

The challenge

The Instituto de Estudios Universitarios (IEU) has more than 15 years of experience in online education and more than 60 online programs through the Moodle learning management platform. The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic brought with it major changes to which educational institutions had to adapt, including the closure of educational facilities to prevent further spread of the virus.

IEU needed to give continuity to the academic curriculum to its students and teachers in a virtual way, as well as to deliver an integral, secure and highly available platform where the identity of the institution itself could be present in order to generate a more natural transition from face-to-face classes to online classes. We wanted users to be able to identify with the institution`s DNA, i.e. corporate colors, logos, campus design; design played a very important role not only visually, but also functionally.

Why Amazon Web Services?

The teamwork that prevailed in the project was key for the generation of this project, because the systems used for several years, as well as the internal processes of each area made it a very interesting challenge to integrate it properly. Likewise, the designed architecture had to have all the security, connectivity and user authentication standards, and at the same time be automatic and scalable to support the workloads.

Mxmart, together with the Instituto de Estudios Universitarios, initiated the work plan for the design, development and integration of the different systems and data sources, as well as the generation of a secure, efficient, optimized and scalable architecture in AWS, capable of interacting with around 20,000 users. All of this by carrying out an integration towards its different LMS (Learning Management System) platforms for e-learning content creation and distribution of academic training activities.

The solution

The architecture was designed in high availability to be deployed in a region that has six Availability Zones (AZ), and to do so in an automated manner.

The services are built within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), leveraging public and private subnets for security, as well as a best-practice configuration for applications, databases and information.

Several security layers were implemented with specialized services, security groups, roles, as well as an integration to the platform for user authentication through Onelogin, which was required by the corporate.

The online campus is an information hub, where students can see the most relevant information in their career, such as their courses, their progress and grades. In this way the campus must communicate with multiple systems through API`s, Amazon API Gateway is another of the main services used, in addition to connectivity to multiple databases, which much of this information is generated on On Premises and where the connection is based on the AWS VPN Site to Site service where we have a private, secure and encrypted connection, ensuring the transfer of information in a secure way.

In order for the source information to be consistent, decreasing the latency of information transfer and minimizing any kind of downtime, an architecture of database services was generated in the AWS cloud, where you could have the same information on On Premises, This architecture consists of database instances in the Amazon Aurora Serverless Service with a PostgreSQL database engine, AWS RDS instances with SQL Server and Aurora Cluster instances for Business Intelligence services and to keep the On Premises databases synchronized with respect to their counterpart in AWS, the AWS Database Migration Service.

The application was developed using the AWS Amplify libraries, which allowed us to develop the frontend with the React Language and the backend development using AWS Lambda functions in various languages such as NodeJs and Python, using the Aws API Gateway service for the generation of multiple APIs. The content storage is done with Amazon S3 service, generating a global exposure of the site through AmazonCloudFront and securing the public APIs with AWS WAF.

Simplified Architecture Diagram

The benefits

Having an infrastructure in the AWS cloud, the Instituto de Estudios Universitarios now has an intuitive platform with high availability, scalability and security where the more than 15,000 students can interact with their teachers for educational follow-up in a practical way.

With this new architecture and the creation of the Online Campus, the user experience was improved with improved interface and screens, as well as greater management of the solution and content, ensuring a smooth transition to online education. In addition, this was the first point of contact to generate a collaborative agreement between IEU and Amazon Web Services to be part of AWS Educate.

About Mxmart Solutions

At MXMART we specialize in offering cutting-edge technology solutions through our services.

We are committed to our customers, and that is why we focus on developing a professional and experienced team for the analysis, design, architecture, generation, implementation and migration of services in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

We implement and migrate E-Learning platforms for institutions, allowing to optimize resources and costs in the cloud.

Our mission at Mxmart is to offer consulting and effective and innovative solutions that adapt to the needs of companies, educational institutions, as well as other entities, promoting their growth and development through a highly trained and experienced professional team.

We would like to learn more about your company or institution and together define a solution that fits your needs, always looking for innovation.

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