The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic pushed every business to adopt digital transformation to stay profitable, efficient and serve communities at large. Learnix had been providing skill development training across subjects to students in their schools successfully, until the pandemic breakout. They wanted to scale to reach new students and cater to the current learners with ease, without hampering the lessons. They had an on-premise solution but they failed when they wanted to go live and couldn’t achieve the level of scale they hoped for. So they approached Zero&One, who did the migration to AWS cloud for them overnight. Moving to the AWS cloud was a huge success, as it helped Learnix to achieve the desired scale with reliability, security and robust expandable infrastructure.

The Challenge

It was difficult to offer regular, on-premise, classes in their school owing to the Covid-19 safety protocols and averting any risk of contracting and transmitting coronavirus. Thus, Learnix wanted to go online and shift to an LMS (Learning Management System) to continue offering online classes amidst the pandemic. However, their on-premise solution, Digitalocean failed when they tried going online.

Why AWS

AWS, without a doubt, offers the most robust, reliable, and resilient cloud infrastructure. Software is no longer a single entity and cloud modernization has made it possible for multiple software to interact, resulting in phenomenal solutions.

Learnix understood the impact it would make by enabling online collaboration and helping students continue their lessons. Hence, they chose to form a collaboration between a network of like-minded people and brought them on a single collaborative platform. This shift to AWS pivoted Learnix’s business operations to a new high and connected 22000 learners with online resources (e-content, technology stacks etc) amidst the Covid-19 pandemic to date.

Why Zero&One

Zero&One is one of the leading AWS Certified Partners that offers services globally with a focus on the MENA region. When you choose to work with us, our experts work in tandem with you to curate a custom solution for your business needs, while maintaining AWS standards of tech enablement.

The Solution

The first thing Zero&One experts did was sit with the key stakeholders and understand the business use case which included identifying the need of AWS, end-user and desired outcome. The most robust solution for them was using Moodle workload. A separate account was created for Learnix on AWS. The typical Moodle architecture on AWS provides autoscaling to meet the high and lows of the demand curve and ensure a smooth transition without downtime.

We have faced a challenge during migration process, choosing the best proper machine type that could hold the load, but we want this to work on autoscaling purposes taking into consideration the cost, as we know the load during afternoon, night, holidays and weekends is very low compared to normal teaching day, for that reason we worked on short-lived EC2 instances that are launched automatically by Auto Scaling Groups based on an auto-scaling policy that utilizes data from cloudwatch monitoring services.

The transition to the cloud was performed with AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) which was provisioned through ClouldFormation. After uploading the template file over CloudFormation, security credentials for Moodle were generated and stored using Amazon S3 permissions. MariaDB was prepared with RDS. The resources were deployed inside a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), plus three Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. Moodle deployment reliability could be further increased by configuring the application server on Amazon EC2 elastic load balancing and autoscaling. The content repository comes from EC2 instances and transitions from Amazon S3 buckets to come up the CloudFront, which is again configured as per the end-user login. This means that a C++ student will be able to access files and content that is specific to the course and a history research student will be able to access data as per their subscription. These EC2 instances are launched automatically by Auto Scaling Groups based on an auto-scaling policy that utilizes data from CloudWatch Monitoring Services. Zero&One also implemented custom autoscaling for RDS that enables new readers in the morning and disables them at night.

For a robust security architecture, we insist on using session manager that provide a secure connection to EC2 instances, we use session manager to avoid the using of inbound ports, ssh, jump box and bastion hosts. User has the privilege to connect to any running machine using one click. In addition to that we don't want all IT users to have access on all instances, by the help of IAM policies we were able to control which individual user can use session manager and which server they can access, to avoid any wrong access and wrong command on a production server that could lead to a downtime. In addition, to that we found that using Inventory is mandatory, for a better visibility about the architecture. that would help us in troubleshooting process in case we face any problem. Inventory will allow us to collect all parameters that are related to network, application, operating system name and version,IAM role, DNS, operating system update time and date. Third feature we have used is the OpsCenter. OpsCenter help us in reducing mean time to solve problems affecting our resources, as we are running like more than 30+ EC2 machines, RDS, load balancer, memchache, cloudfront. We have integrated it with cloudwatch to start receiving OpsItems from alarms, in case of high cpu utilization, failing of an instance, EBS reaches maximum capacity, etc... based on the report we can investigate and diagnose the root cause of the problem.

Results and Benefits

Digital transformation using AWS cloud proved to be a game-changer for Learnix. The Amazon EC2 auto-scaling and elastic load balancing managed the user-specific cloud front irrespective of users geographic location and removed downtime. ElastiCache was used to scale seamlessly and store open-source compatible in-memory data over the cloud to be used by the end-users. The magnitude of scale with AWS helped them to cater to 22,000 students amidst the pandemic and the number is going strong. With automated uptime, the time to market was reduced and gave enough space in time for higher value application enhancement for the future.

A detailed TCO analysis showed that the costs were reduced from $17,000 to $7,000, which means a reduction in monthly expenditure by 40%. The team is equipped to work on the future scalability and research, thanks to the reduced costs, and reliability of the migration and robust infrastructure to carry operations even with higher yet distributed and managed workload. Learnix is now focussing on business more than IT infrastructure operations and maintenance.