GTU determined that a public cloud service could deliver the availability needed, as well as the scalability to support growth and the elasticity to manage demand peaks. As GTU was reviewing various local cloud services, a former GTU student working at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the United States contacted Dr. Aggarwal and pitched AWS as being a strong fit for the institution’s needs. GTU undertook a detailed assessment that confirmed the student’s perspective, and developed a plan to build and migrate to an AWS architecture. GTU undertook the preliminary work itself before turning to AWS as the project gained complexity and momentum. “AWS was extremely helpful in working with us to determine an optimum architecture and configuration to meet our requirements,” says Dr. Kalpesh Parikh, IT Advisor at GTU. “We also received strong assistance from an AWS partner for troubleshooting.”

GTU is now running Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to provide the compute resources to run its applications and services, with Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) providing storage resources. Amazon Glacier provides data archiving and long-term backup, while

AWS and its partner have helped to train GTU’s technology team to help optimize GTU’s use of AWS resources and address any problems that may occur. This included monitoring usage of the website and applications between 12 a.m. and 5 a.m., and scaling down the resources to minimize the cost to GTU. “The team was also able to configure security groups within AWS to better protect our resources from external attacks, and minimize the risk of data loss and leakage,” says Dr. Parikh.

The figure below illustrates GTU’s Project Mentoring and Monitoring environment in AWS: