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Microsoft Workloads on Education Board About the Customer The Bihar School Examination Board is established for holding and conducting an examination at the end of the Secondary School stage, for prescribing course of studies for such examination and for carrying out such other objects and duties as may be considered necessary for the purpose as stated in the Act, Rules and Regulations of the Board. Bihar School Examination Board conducts Annual Secondary School Examination in the month of February/March and Supplementary School Examination in the month of August/September on the basis of course/syllabus as prescribed by the state Government. The Challenge Frequent Outages Frequent downtimes during heavy load at their on premise hosting & Outages resulting in loss of brand value. Unable to match access spikes on physical DC set-up. Deteriorating Hardware Slow and deteriorating hardware stack hampering performance High capex on hardware procurement & lengthy process . Current on-premise hosting isn't highly available &Difficulty in scaling the infrastructure results in unable to perform at scale. Performance at Scale The Challenge As a part of the Digital India initiative Bihar state examination board has developed an online university collaboration platform that allows students to apply for multiple graduate colleges admission , application status tracking & admission status and results tracking as well , all in single click. Core Problems stated by the State Education Board & Universities were: 1. Frequent downtimes during load on their on premise hosting. 2. Unable to match access spikes on physical DC set-up. 3. Unable to scale database for shorter duration due to licensing issues and hardware unavailability. 4. Uneven traffic as the portal usage will be high only during admissions & results , infrastructure agility is the most imperative component on the expected solutions – Scaling up more servers during admissions & scaling down after the admissions are over. With High profile public sector involvement and impact on the exam results/data provided to be showcased on this platform, which has high media vicinity, the unpredictable nature of the viewer count, including the high data volume, the challenge put across the team was to come up with a solution covering all aspects of scalability. The view count was expected to be in hundreds per second with a target audience of 30 Million students. The application should be able to withstand such a load without any downtime. Since there is payment transaction is also involved there could not have been a downtime for even a few seconds. Proposed Solution Minfy’ s Enterprise Cloud Architects worked with the Infrastructure team of the customer to migrate their website on AWS paying special attention of cost,scalability & security. The proposed solution will enable them to scale from a minimal set of users to thousands at any given time. To accomplish this requirement, the solution was implemented using services such as AWS Autoscale , AWS EC2, AWS Elastic Load balancer and AWS S3. ● A highly scalable and available web architecture was proposed on AWS for this workload. ● Application was designed using .Net by an ISV partner with ALB, Active Directory and Multiple Application Servers for modules. ● AWS Auto Scaling will manage un Healthy EC2 instances . AWS Auto Scaling will ensure minimum number app& dev EC2 instances are always running ,In event of failure , new instances will be launched between 30-120 seconds automatically . ● To ensure on high availability the image of the application server has been launched in another availability zone to make sure the application availability if any disaster strikes i.e if the primary Availability Zone goes down. Migration Process Minfy's Implementation team along with the Cloud architects worked with Infrastructure team & business stakeholders from the customer’s end to derive out the migration plan to ensure on zero / very minimal interruption to the website’s availability. ● Applications were moved in a manual lift and shift approach. ● According to customer’s solution architecture, server size, OS and RAM the Infrastructure on cloud was designed and deployed. Three instances were created, each to handle a specific type of functionality. 1. RDPS-OpenVPN: Network connectivity to web server and Database connectivity 2. RDPS-Web server: To manage the website 3. RDPS-DBMS: To manage the database Server instance (App + DB + AD + Cookie Cutter + File server) have been implemented in a Private Subnet as this won’t be exposed on public. Subnets are used to virtually segregate the servers into various groups. Each subnet is launched under its own subnet range for additional security. Network Access Security List (NACL) is a stateless firewall that provides both inbound and out bound access restriction. Architecture Benefits Following were the benefits that the customer witnessed post migration 1. Servers could handle a consistent load of over 25000 sessions without any downtime. 2. During the last two days before the deadline for the application for admissions the load increased multi-folds. Additional base servers were launched to address those workloads. 3. Compared to the previous year where in there were frequent down times, this year experienced none. 4. Application performance was maintained as Core and RAM usage was maintained below 75% due to Auto Scale. 6. Additional compute could be provisioned on the database as well during the last few days of registration 7. More or less all the users who had applied to various colleges on the platform logged in on a single day within the first hour to check for results as it got declared. AWS Autoscale could effective handle such a spike in load. Outcomes & Results Agility in the infrastructure Performance at Scale Faster Innovation High Availability Security Scalability Now the customer can handle the increased demand to scale up or scale down your operational and storage needs of IT changing situations. High Availability AWS scalability features allows the solution to remain fully self managed, providing confidence that it will be available at any given time with zero dependency on manual management. Disaster Recovery Data protection achieved - AWS takes backup of the data at a safe and secure location and protects it from sudden power failure, natural disaster, or other crisis. MinfyTM born in the cloud firm, is committed to helping enterprises with its impeccable IT solutions in the cloud Era, We help the organisations to move forward in the digital world by changing the way they use IT. We are committed to delivering today’s best-of-breed cloud solutions to the organisations, Our Service offerings Cloud consulting & Migration Services. Application Modernisation Services. DevOps Services. Next Gen Managed Services. Sec- Ops & SOC services. AI,ML & Big Data Analytics. About Microsoft Workload Migrations Are you struggling to find a way to migrate and modernize your legacy Microsoft applications? Minfy can help you migrate essential workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS) responsibly by re-architecting and optimizing them on AWS. Then you can implement the latest development and DevOps processes such as Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment CI/CD, so you can get to market faster and realize ROI quicker.
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