AWS Education Practice
Focus on Innovating at High Velocity
Silicon Overdrive is committed to Education, with a special focus on Higher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa. Whether you’re looking to migrate your LMS to the Cloud, or are looking for a simple online storage solution, AWS and Silicon Overdrive can help.
AWS provides a set of flexible services that are designed to simplify provisioning and management of your Education infrastructure and applications. With these services, you can quickly build out your cloud infrastructure, deploy applications like your LMS to any instance, or develop complex applications on AWS.
As AWS Premier Partners, Silicon Overdrive provides AWS Education Solutions, AWS cloud infrastructure managed services including architecting, migration, security, maintenance and monitoring of your AWS environments with a security and compliance emphasis.
Get Started with Your AWS Cloud Education Journey
AWS and Silicon Overdrive have the tools, services, and resources to help accelerate your journey to the cloud. To get started, your Educational Institution can leverage AWS’s highly scalable and cost-effective infrastructure resources and DevOps tooling in minutes with no upfront cost.
Learn More About How AWS Benefits Educational Institutions
Ghala PAC - AWS Cloud Migration and Well-Architected Framework Review
EdTech Webinar: Simplify your AWS Cloud Migration
Education Case Studies
The Challenge
The University of the Witwatersrand is a multi-campus South African public research university situated in the northern areas of central Johannesburg. It is more commonly known as Wits University or Wits.
Wits had an urgent requirement to move their Sakai Learning Management System (LMS) from their on-premise servers to the cloud due to the COVID-19 lockdown and to ensure availability, security and compliance.
After experiencing an outage on their on-premise Sakai environment at peak demand, the University started exploring cloud solutions to ensure the availability of their LMS to their students and faculty.
The Solution
The Silicon Overdrive team worked closely with the Wits and AWS Public Sector teams to architect and implement a secure, fault-tolerant and highly-available solution.
By implementing Sakai LMS using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) across Multiple Availability Zones (Multi-AZ), the University achieved a highly available solution, ensuring that Wits students and staff have uninterrupted access to the Sakai LMS.
Amazon CloudFront (Content Delivery Network) is used to cache the Sakai application content to South African edge locations for the fast delivery of the content to students. Furthermore, the University wanted to reduce the data costs for students accessing Sakai from home, so the University approached the local Mobile Operators to zero-rate these data charges.
DevOps services used: AWS Systems Manager, NAT Gateways, Elastic Load Balancer, EC2, S3, S3 Glacier, Route53, CloudFormation, AWS Backup, EBS, Amazon EFS, Amazon RDS, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, AWS Trusted Advisor, Amazon SNS, AWS VPN, AWS Active Directory Service, Amazon CloudFront, AWS Certificate Manager, AWS IAM, AWS Key Management Service, Amazon SES.
Project Manager: Charlton Daniels
The Outcome
Turnaround time for this project was of paramount importance. The teams were able to launch the new environment and migrate from the on-prem environment to AWS in just over a month. Since the new environment went live, Wits has had 100% uptime. The students now have an unparalleled user experience due to fast and locally cached content, and zero-rated data charges.
The Challenge
The eAr Academy is a fully digital, online music school offering curriculum-based courses, embodying the practical, theoretical and philosophical elements of learning music.
When The eAr first approached Silicon Overdrive, all they had was the concept to disrupt the Music Education Industry in South Africa, and a design of what they wanted the platform to look like. What The eAr needed, more than anything else, was a company to partner with who would understand the nuances of what they were trying to achieve.
After a few business development meetings, it was decided that Silicon Overdrive would custom build The eAr a new LMS (Learning Management System) platform that would meet their specific requirements and subscription model.
During the design phase it was decided that since The eAr needed to be highly available and resilient, as well as secure, compliant, and scalable, it was clear that AWS would be the best hosting option.
That meant that the development team could custom build the platform to leverage AWS native services like Amazon Elastic Transcoder as part of the core solution, while also ensuring that student data (such as personal info and payment details) and course content would be safeguarded and stored in a compliant environment.
Since The eAr is a video education platform, it is imperative that they deliver the best quality video for the right device. It was therefore decided that The eAr would need to transcode the course video files from their source format into versions able to meet students’ device and quality preferences.
The Solution
As an AWS Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR) Partner, our team architected a best-practice, secure and compliant, highly available, and scalable solution to host The eAr’s custom-developed LMS on AWS.
Following a DevOps methodology, AWS CodePipeline was used to automate continuous delivery to rapidly and reliably deliver features and updates.
To deliver on the video requirements, Amazon Elastic Transcoder was selected. Amazon Elastic Transcoder is media transcoding in the cloud. It is designed to be a highly scalable, easy to use and a cost-effective way for developers and businesses to convert (or “transcode”) media files from their source format into versions that will playback on devices like smartphones, tablets and PCs.
Using Amazon Elastic Transcoder, Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront, The eAr can store, transcode and deliver their content. By setting the S3 permissions of the Amazon CloudFront distribution in Amazon Elastic Transcoder, it is a one step process to transcode content with Amazon Elastic Transcoder and deliver the multiple output videos via progressive download or adaptive bitrate streaming with CloudFront.
The eAr is also using Amazon Transcribe as part of their solution. Amazon Transcribe converts sounds from the instructors’ instruments as they play into accessible files. That means that as the instructor plays their instrument, it transcribes the audio into data, and then that data is used to populate digital sheet music. That means that the student is able to listen to the instructor play, while also being able to follow the sheet music at the same time.
Amazon CloudFront is used to deliver content with low latency and high transfer speeds to students. Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service built for high performance, security, and developer convenience. By using CloudFront, students can start streams quickly, play them with consistency, while the platform delivers high-quality video to any device.
The Outcome
By utilizing AWS managed services like Amazon Elastic Transcoder and Amazon Transcribe, the Silicon Overdrive development team was able to complete the development of the custom LMS platform faster than what would have been traditionally possible.
Using CodePipeline, application enhancements can be rapidly deployed, risk free, and ensure the availability of the service for the students. The eAr can ensure faster delivery and roll back to a previous version, should something go wrong, without incident.
Thanks to Amazon CloudFront, students can load and stream videos faster, and because CloudFront serves the ideal video format for the device the student is using; data usage is kept to a minimum.
Very high POPIA and GDPR compliance scores were achieved, ensuring the security of the students Personal Identifiable Information.
By leveraging the best-practice architectures and AWS managed services, The eAr is able to seamlessly scale to meet the rapid uptake of new students on the platform.