ASOEC Group scales distance learning to 30 thousand students with AWS technology implemented by Flexa Cloud

The Salgado de Oliveira Association of Education and Culture (ASOEC Group) owns Universidade Universo, Unitri and Colégio de Aplicação D. Helder Câmara. It is among the largest education groups in the country with over 30 students.

With the arrival of the pandemic, the institution needed to accelerate its distance learning project, as social isolation prevented face-to-face classes.

In this article, you will understand how the AWS technology implemented by Flexa Cloud helped achieve this goal in record time. Follow up!

The challenge

Implement distance learning for more than 30 thousand students.

Since 2014, Grupo ASOEC relies on cloud computing provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, it was necessary to expand the offer of distance learning to more than 30 thousand students.

Before that, only 1,8 students took distance learning classes. So, scaling to 30 users in such a short time represented a major technical challenge. 

“The main bottleneck for this was access to the virtual learning environment, since we needed to scale the systems until then used only by distance education students, who were about 10% of the total, to 100% of the students”, says the director of TI, Helio Rubens Soares.

Solution

Flexa Cloud reinforces the ASOEC Group's technological infrastructure on AWS.

Flexa Cloud, AWS business partner and ASOEC group IT service provider, was then called in to make adjustments to the IT infrastructure. “The peaks would have a volume 20 times greater than initially planned, mainly during the tests and on the days when the monthly fees are due”, explains Deivid Bitti, chief scientist at Flexa.  

In practice, it was up to the Flexa team to structure the infrastructure that made it possible to scale Moodle, allowing it to be used by all students in the cloud. But for it to get off the ground, it was necessary to have a test environment that would allow simulating the 30 simultaneous accesses, and then a structure that would guarantee the necessary flexibility and scalability.

Flexa Cloud supported the development of a database-based solution Amazon Aurora, Amazon ElasticCache and AWS Application Auto Scaling to the application environment. The backend was supported by Amazon Cloud Watch.

Result

Technologically prepared ASOEC group despite the pandemic.

“We gained a linear scale in terms of capacity keeping the response times constant regardless of the number of requests per minute”, celebrates the IT director of the ASOEC group.

To reach this solution, the Flexa Cloud team created a test scenario that allowed the simulation of simultaneous uses with 30 thousand users. “The testing process required 25 machines to simulate the distribution of this load. As we simulated, we identified bottlenecks in the architecture”, says Deivid Bitti, remembering that the important thing for architecture was not the volume of people online, but what they are doing. 

Now, adds the executive, “ten thousand people can generate more load than 50 thousand. It depends on the activity. Behavior is important. First we defined what the test scenario was. We did the tests and adjustments and came to a consensus.”

In summary, the project results can be listed as follows:

  • the expansion of moodle allowed the institution to build an end-to-end digital journey for its students;
  • the entire process of interaction between the student and the university can be carried out online — from the entrance exam to the tests, passing through the classes;
  • Unlike more than 70% of higher education institutions in the country, the ASOEC Group's enrollment renewal was not hampered, and the student attrition rate did not increase;
  • environment capable of supporting 30 thousand simultaneous tests and 30 thousand simultaneous students in online classes.

→ Want to scale the distance learning capacity of your academic institution? Do like the ASOEC Group: discover Flexa Cloud services and take advantage of the best of AWS technology. Click on the banner below and learn more!


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