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Cloud Migration · AWS Migration Lead · 2020

UFE Online Learning on AWS

Migrated one of Mongolia’s oldest universities to AWS in 10 days during the COVID-19 lockdown — delivered with Fibo Cloud as UFE’s AWS Partner, and published as an official AWS case study.

Read the AWS case studyUFE Reference

AWS (EC2, S3, CloudFront, RDS, ELB, Auto Scaling, Route 53), CloudWatch, Nginx, Redis, MySQL, PHP

10days

On-premises to AWS, zero downtime, mid-lockdown.

ufe.edu.mn
UFE — online learning platform
10 days
full migration
99.99%
service availability
90%
of students online daily

The cutover

A nationwide lockdown gave the university one week’s notice

Before — on-premises
  • Two servers in a local university data center
  • Overloaded past ~400 concurrent students — the whole LMS went offline
  • Unreliable power; manual restart after every outage
  • Nationwide lockdown closed every campus within a week
After — AWS, 10 days later
  • CloudFront, EC2 with EBS, and RDS for MySQL
  • EC2 Auto Scaling absorbs exam-period peaks automatically
  • Database in a private subnet; Inspector, CloudTrail and MFA across accounts
  • 99.99% service availability; 90% of students online daily

Architecture

Three-tier AWS deployment across two Availability Zones

Route 53
DNS + health checks
CloudFront
CDN — edge caching
S3
static assets · versioned
VPC
Availability Zone AAvailability Zone B
Public subnet
Elastic Load Balancer
TLS termination · health checks
Private subnet — application
EC2 Auto Scaling group
EC2 — Nginx + PHP
EBS volumes
EC2 — Nginx + PHP
EBS volumes
Private subnet — cache
ElastiCache — Redis
session + query cache
Private subnet — data
RDS MySQL
Multi-AZ
RDS MySQL
standby
Observability & security — across every tier
CloudWatch
metrics · traffic patterns
CloudTrail
audit log · MFA on all accounts
Inspector
EC2 vulnerability scanning
Backup & disaster recovery
  • Automated RDS snapshots with point-in-time restore
  • Standby promoted automatically on primary failure
  • Versioned S3 copies of course content
  • Documented restore runbook, rehearsed with UFE staff

The University of Finance and Economics, founded in 1924, is one of Mongolia’s oldest institutions — over 6,000 students and more than 300 employees, running some online courses on on-premises technology since 2015.

That setup was two servers in a local data center. Past roughly 400 concurrent students the whole learning management system went offline, and an unreliable power supply meant someone had to restart the server manually after every outage.

In late January 2020 the government announced a nationwide lockdown. Every educational institution closed within the space of a week and overseas students were recalled home. UFE decided to move its entire learning management system to AWS.

Fibo Cloud was UFE’s AWS Partner for the migration. University IT engineers and IT professors worked alongside our team through the winter break — content migration alone took three days, and the full cutover landed in 10 days, ahead of the new semester. Procuring on-premises servers would have taken around 48 days.

After the migration 80% of the university’s workloads ran on AWS. In October 2020 the Ministry of Education invited UFE — one of five universities — to present its digital transformation.

Highlights

  • Delivered in 10 days, in time for the new semester — bypassing a server procurement cycle that would have taken around 48 days.
  • Content migration completed in three days, with UFE IT staff and professors working alongside the Fibo Cloud team.
  • Amazon CloudFront for content distribution, EC2 with EBS for the application tier, and Amazon RDS for MySQL.
  • EC2 Auto Scaling absorbs exam-time peaks on its own, removing the need for manual intervention.
  • Database isolated in a private subnet, reachable only from the application tier.
  • Amazon Inspector for EC2 vulnerability visibility; AWS CloudTrail action logs with multi-factor authentication enforced across all accounts.
  • Amazon CloudWatch gives departments traffic and usage data on when students are online and how they learn.
  • Published as an official AWS case study; UFE presented the transformation to Mongolia’s Ministry of Education in October 2020.

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