Mahatma Gandhi University Drives Local Economic Development in India Through Digital Learning on AWS

Situated in Kerala, a state of 33 million people in India’s far south, Mahatma Gandhi University (MGU) is named after the renowned Indian civil rights figure Mahatma Gandhi. Since its establishment in 1983, MGU has offered a growing range of academic degrees, positioning itself as an extensive research-based university leading the development of indigenous technologies.

MGU embarked on a mission to broaden its offerings through online courses, catering to residents across the state in both urban and rural areas. The goal was to provide an accessible online education platform to a wider audience, transcending geographical boundaries.

Initially, MGU launched its online education platform to run in the university’s on-premises data center. The platform includes a learning management system (LMS), evaluation systems, and a collaborative portal for seamless resource sharing between students and teachers. Over time, the university saw the data center infrastructure wasn’t fit for scale; plus, there were frequent periods of downtime. Vishnu Saju, assistant director at Mahatma Gandhi University, states, "We knew our on-premises infrastructure couldn’t support the compute, storage, and networking bandwidth requirements to deliver online courses."

MGU decided to transform its online education platform running on premises to a cloud-based solution. Amvion Labs, an AWS Partner, approached the university with a proposal to construct a digital learning platform on AWS that supports both campus-based and online programs. Saju says, "Amvion Labs provided us with valuable insights and showcased an extensive knowledge of migrating workloads to AWS." 

Engineers at Amvion Labs began developing environments on AWS designed specifically for the migration of on-premises workloads to the cloud. Throughout the build and migration phase, Amvion Labs collaborated closely with the newly established MGU Innovation Foundation (MGUIF) team. The entire migration process was completed in approximately one month. "The Amvion Labs team was always available to provide guidance on best practices and offer recommendations for optimization," Saju adds.

Amvion Labs migrated the university’s student LMS, which supports enrollment processes and teacher progress tracking, and its Automated Learning and Evaluation Management System to Amazon EC2 instances. MGU also adopted Amazon RDS, a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases on AWS. Additionally, it uses Amazon EBS, an easy-to-use, scalable, high-performance block-storage service and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for static imagery. MGU also engaged Amazon CloudWatch for security monitoring of applications and infrastructure. Saju says, "With AWS, we can easily scale resources to accommodate changing workloads. The transition has resulted in seamless access to resources for students, regardless of their location and a 50 percent improvement in performance with uninterrupted availability.”