Moodle LMS migrated to AWS — scalable, load-shedding-proof cloud infrastructure for education.
Eliminated on-premise constraints and load-shedding exposure, enabled scalability, reduced costs.
Challenge
BizzCo Learning offers industry-leading companies a way to streamline their supply chain operations through people development. BizzCo realise the impact of effective supply chain management on productivity and profitability. Their unique approach incorporates industry-based Training & Development, Competency Assessments and Advisory Services to the supply chain industry. To date BizzCo offers 300 Training & Development Courses with over 4,697 professionals trained.
The BizzCo team faced a unique challenge running their Moodle environment in an on-premise data centre — they found themselves running out of storage space on their shared server. This made the customer stagnant and unable to scale their product and roll out to more companies. The data centre gave the customer a 15-day deadline to migrate all of their data before they would shut down their server and no longer have access.
As much as running an LMS on-premise may turn out to be costly, running systems on-premise in South Africa comes with planning around load shedding schedules and other potential hindrances which in turn drive operation costs up. Migrating on-premise workloads to the cloud has proven to be the solution for many institutions looking to modernise their environments and benefit from leveraging the advanced infrastructure offered by AWS.
Solution
CloudZA designed and implemented a solution inclusive of a Well-Architected Landing Zone to help ensure the solution is founded on best practices. The Moodle LMS operates on Amazon EC2 instances and the database layer is served by Amazon RDS. Both layers sit inside a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) to maintain security posture, with an internet gateway providing bi-directional connectivity between the internet and the VPC.
With data being stored in an S3 bucket for a highly resilient storage solution, BizzCo can now back up their information in the most cost-efficient manner while implementing a more secure solution to run their LMS on.
Result
BizzCo eliminated load-shedding disruptions entirely and can now scale compute capacity to meet enrolment peaks. Automated backups to S3 provide a reliable recovery point, and total infrastructure cost was reduced compared to on-premise operations. The Well-Architected foundation positions BizzCo to continue growing their course catalogue and professional training programmes without infrastructure constraints.