Case Study

Moodle on Amazon Web Services

Universidad del Valle Atemajac

Amazon EC2

About UNIVA

Founded in 1962, the Universidad del Valle de Atemajac (UNIVA), offers educational services at the bachelor`s, master`s, doctorate, diploma and workshop levels, as well as online education, offering thousands of students online courses in all its branches located in 6 states of the Mexican Republic, generating a solution to the social needs of each region.

The challenge

UNIVA has implemented online education through the learning management platform, Moodle, as well as in different curricula as a support tool for students and teachers, in addition to the Univa online program in which it offers 100% online undergraduate and graduate degrees.

As the number of students, teachers and courses increases, as well as the new modalities of distance education, the interaction towards the platform is increasing, so a secure, innovative, elastic and highly available technological solution is needed.

One of the most interesting challenges was to achieve the authentication of more than 15,000 users of the active directory with the Moodle platform, this in a secure and synchronized way between the physical domain controller servers and the virtual servers in the AWS cloud.

Why Amazon Web Services?

After a thorough review of the projects presented by three suppliers and each one proposing the solution in different public clouds, the decision to work with the Amazon Web Services cloud was made, thanks to the teamwork between the AWS staff and the partner Mxmart who were always in communication with the customer to understand the requirement and to be able to offer the best technological solution.

Among several factors for decision making include the capacity, depth and constant innovation of the different services of AWS that characterizes them since 2006, another important factor was the knowledge and experience of the partner Mxmart on the LMS Moodle system as this allowed it to generate a unique architecture in its kind, being able to integrate the latest services to offer the best solution and optimizing consumption costs.

The solution

The architecture is based on six different availability zones, using private subnets, within which there are high-end instances in SPOT in an automated scaling group, this for processing and self-generation of the systems. Aurora Serverless services with PostgreSQL database engine help us for the administration and integrity of the data in conjunction with Elastic File System, services for the protection of information.

The authentication of users to the Moodle platform is done through local servers in the active directory, which in real time are synchronizing with virtual servers in the cloud, the connection is made securely via VPN.

It is important to mention that one of the services that help us in the response times of the requests is the Redis service, which is based on a system of memory cache, which improves the experience of the users.

Currently, 13 Moodle sites are managed on the same infrastructure, which through load balancers and access routes redirects traffic according to the user`s profile, making it a scalable and elastic solution.

The security and integrity of the information is a very important issue, that is why the project was carried out integrating several services of perimeter and internal security, as well as security certificates for the encryption of the information, also integrated services for the generation of backups in a periodic and automated way.

Simplified Architecture Diagram

Having an AWS cloud infrastructure with a distributed architecture in different services, all of them configured with the best practices, is generating a process of innovation with respect to the traditional scheme of large servers where all processes are concentrated, this is a very important step towards digital transformation.

The benefits are not only technological, but also become a cost reduction in the different budget items of the departments, but above all and most importantly the user experience.

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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