The University
The University of Los Lagos is a public, autonomous, and regional institution that has served the community since August 30, 1993.
Teaching, Research, Outreach, Production, Management, and Services are some of its core organizational pillars, always prioritizing professional education in line with the quality standards of modern society. In addition, it offers state-of-the-art technology infrastructure and a university environment that fosters the comprehensive development of each student and the academic community as a whole.
With over 8,000 enrolled students, distributed across its strategic locations in Osorno, Puerto Montt, Chiloé, and Santiago, the University of Los Lagos currently leads in applied research at the national level, promotes university sports across a wide variety of competitive and recreational disciplines, and offers a diverse range of locally and regionally relevant degree programs, not only at the traditional undergraduate level but also for workers, technical careers, and postgraduate studies.
The Challenge
The University of Los Lagos uses Moodle as the LMS for all its students and faculty. It had an on-premise deployment to support both undergraduate and postgraduate workloads.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of visits to the institutional website increased significantly.
This surge in traffic from students and faculty caused service degradation, as the on-premise solution was not optimized for a high volume of concurrent users.
The challenge was to deploy a production environment capable of supporting 11,000 students without service degradation and maintaining operational continuity within 3 weeks.
The Solution
The partnership with the University of Los Lagos was carried out alongside Amazon Web Services, which introduced CloudHesive as a Premier Partner with competencies in the Public Sector and Education. This designation recognizes technical expertise and a proven track record in building solutions that support critical workloads for clients in Higher Education, K-12, Research, and Publishing.
The solution for the University of Los Lagos began with an analysis of the on-premise infrastructure. CloudHesive collaborated with the university’s technical team to design a highly available, redundant, and scalable infrastructure model.
The approach involved decoupling the Moodle servers and using database services across multiple availability zones.
A database model with read replicas was designed to enable advanced analytics, allowing the university to monitor platform usage and track student and faculty performance.
Additionally, the architecture was designed to support BigBlueButton as a service, enabling students and faculty to access virtual classes and enhancing their user experience.
Both Moodle and BigBlueButton run on secure and redundant environments.
Technologies Used
VPC, EC2, ELB, EFS, CloudFormation, SES, RDS
Benefits
The benefits of this project for the University of Los Lagos were numerous. CloudHesive successfully migrated Moodle in just 3 weeks, deployed the environment in a much more robust architecture, enhanced security controls, and placed the environment under the management of CloudHesive’s Managed Services Team.
Testimonial:
Luis Muñoz Jaramillo, Director of IT – University of Los Lagos
