Duy Tan University (DTU) is one of Vietnam's leading private universities, renowned for its innovation and strong commitment to integrating technology into teaching and research. Established in 1994 in Da Nang, the university has steadily grown into a prestigious academic hub, attracting thousands of students from across the country. DTU has always been at the forefront of adopting the latest technologies, particularly in the field of education and distance learning, to provide students with a modern and comprehensive learning experience.
In the rapidly evolving digital age, Duy Tan University continues to enhance its IT infrastructure, including modernizing applications to improve the quality of education. This effort is part of the university's long-term strategy to offer flexible and effective learning solutions, meeting the growing demands of both students and faculty in the digital era.
DTU's Challenge
To improve the quality of teaching and innovate learning methods, Duy Tan University (DTU) has launched an online learning application called ClickQA. This application allows students to study anytime, anywhere using their smartphones and offers a new learning experience where they can earn points to exchange for rewards.
The application was initially deployed on an on-premise physical server infrastructure. However, over time, DTU encountered several limitations, particularly in the application's ability to scale to support up to 10,000 simultaneous users. Additionally, managing the server infrastructure consumed significant resources and increased IT operational costs.
To address these challenges, CMC Telecom, as a top-tier AWS service partner in Vietnam, collaborated with DTU’s engineering team. After thorough consultation and application assessment, CMC Telecom and DTU decided to migrate the ClickQA application to Amazon ECS. This solution not only reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) but also offers flexible scalability, high availability, enhanced security, and eases the burden of infrastructure management for DTU’s IT team.
CMC Telecom Assists DTU in Modernizing the ClickQA Application
Facing the challenges of scaling and managing their online learning platform, ClickQA, Duy Tan University (DTU) partnered with CMC Telecom, a top-tier AWS service provider in Vietnam. Together, they tackled the issues by migrating the application to Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and AWS Fargate, a serverless container deployment solution that alleviates the burden of server management. Key Advantages of the ClickQA Application on Amazon ECS:
Flexible Scalability
By deploying the application's components as microservices on Amazon ECS with Fargate, ClickQA can quickly and easily scale to handle up to 10,000 simultaneous users. This flexibility ensures that the application can meet high demand without compromising performance.
High Availability
To protect application data from potential disasters, CMC Telecom conducted training for DTU's IT team, emphasizing the importance of disaster recovery (DR) strategies and backup solutions. In this project, CMC Telecom implemented a centralized backup scheduling solution using AWS Backup, ensuring that data stored in the primary AWS region is also backed up in another region. This allows DTU to restore application data even if a severe issue occurs in the primary region.
Enhanced Security
CMC Telecom implemented various security solutions to provide multi-layered protection for the ClickQA application, from user access to data stored on AWS. The application is safeguarded by firewalls that defend against Internet-based attacks, and it is deployed in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with additional firewall layers to control traffic. Data is encrypted when stored on AWS services, and container images are scanned for vulnerabilities, enabling DTU to address any security issues proactively.
Optimized Operations and Accelerated Deployment
Với việc ứng dụng các dịch vụ CI-CD của AWS như AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodePipeline…, CMC Telecom đã triển khai các pipeline để DTU có thể dễ dàng triển khai và cập nhật cấu hình cho cả ứng dụng ClickQA và các thay đổi cấu hình trên hạ tầng AWS. Bằng cách áp dụng CI-CD, đội ngũ DevOps của DTU đã rút ngắn thời gian triển khai ứng dụng một cách đáng kể so với phương pháp triển khai truyền thống trước đây.
DTU’s Infrastructure architecture on AWS
Benefits of AWS
Through this project, CMC Telecom helped Duy Tan University (DTU) clearly recognize the value that cloud technology, particularly AWS, brings to the institution. By deploying the ClickQA application on Amazon ECS and leveraging best practices throughout the implementation, the application not only met the university’s initial requirement to handle a large number of student users but also achieved the following benefits:
- High Availability: The application ensures high availability with a Multi-AZ (Availability Zone) design combined with a robust backup solution.
- Enhanced Security: Security was strengthened with data encryption, multiple firewall layers, and specialized security measures for containerized applications.
- Automated Deployment and Updates: The application’s deployment and updates are now automated and accelerated through the use of CI/CD pipelines
- Cost Optimization: Infrastructure costs were optimized by deploying the application with Fargate launch type, allowing for flexible scaling, and by utilizing cost-saving models like Savings Plans and Fargate Spot instances