Institut Obert de Catalunya (IOC) is the distance learning institute of the Department of Education of the Generalitat de Catalunya, providing individuals with an extensive range of educational offerings that allow them to study flexibly and according to their unique needs.

The management of IOC aimed to leverage the benefits of the public cloud to improve the quality and scalability of some of its services. The chosen ones were the four services related to Academic Management and the Learning Platform: the web portal, the Campus, the Academic Secretariats of the various centers, and the student ePortfolio.

In this context, we decided to implement this project, which we named the “IOC Service Migration Project to AWS,” to leverage the highly satisfactory experience we had previously gained from migrating other services to the cloud within the Department of Education (such as ÀGORA, ODISSEA, etc.).

The new IOC service needed to have a new architecture in order to adapt to:

• The variable load requirements of the service (scalability and cost).
• The quality and response time of the service (robustness, resilience, and reliability).

The final objective of the project was to perform a Lift & Shiftmigration of the four IOC services (Portal, Campus, Secretaries, and ePortafoli) to AWS, with minimal modifications to the software.

To achieve this objective, IThinkUPC proposed a migration strategy for IOC’s services to AWS, based on AWS cloud migration best practices, comprising the following phases:

Phase 1. Analyze the feasibility of migrating to AWS: In this phase, we provided the necessary advisory to select the appropriate AWS services and design the architecture that best meets IOC’s needs. Some of the most relevant tasks were:

• Design and implement a service architecture that best meets the actual needs of the service while harnessing the full potential of AWS without significant changes to the software. Specifically, the following AWS services were primarily used: EC2 servers, EFS storage, RDS Serverless databases, and frontends in Auto Scaling Groups (ASG).
• Analyze the costs of the new infrastructure across the various identified consumption profiles.
• Design the necessary software adaptations.
• Identify, plan, and execute all the necessary POCs (proofs of concept), both technical and functional.

Phase 2. Migrate the services to AWS: Once the feasibility and viability of the migration were validated to address this phase, it was decided to first migrate the Portal, Campus, and ePortafoli services as a block, followed immediately by the Secretaria service. Some of the most relevant tasks were:

• Create the new infrastructure on AWS according to the results of Phase 1.
• Implement the IOC software adaptations.
• Define and validate the migration strategy to AWS.
• Conduct migration tests for the four services.
• Conduct migration tests for the four services.
• Execute the migration according to the previously approved strategy.

Phase 3. Optimize the IOC AWS platform: Once the four services were operational, we continued monitoring the infrastructure and its costs, identifying proposals for optimization and cost reduction. The optimization process must remain a continuous effort after launch and in the years that follow.

The new IOC service platform on AWS, managed by IThinkUPC, offers the following advantages:

• Ability to continue growing in terms of volume and new services.

• Automatic scalability based on demand.

• Reduction in maintenance costs.

• Adaptation to the new continuous integration standards.

• Millora de la seguretat.