Scaling LMS with AWS: Secure, Efficient Video Processing

EdIndia Foundation is revolutionizing education in India by harnessing advanced technological solutions to provide high-quality, interactive learning experiences with Pan India distribution. The platform offers a diverse range of educational content, including soft skill development sessions, D.El.Ed courses, and advanced English and Hindi language programs, ensuring accessibility for both teachers and students. By embracing a cloud-based infrastructure, EdIndia guarantees scalability, efficiency, and security, enabling seamless delivery of learning resources across the country.

 

With a focus on empowering educators, EdIndia equips them with cutting-edge digital tools to enhance classroom teaching and foster improved student outcomes. The platform’s architecture focuses on scalability, fault tolerance, and security. Through this robust system, EdIndia reaches over 200,000 teachers online and indirectly impacts more than 5 million students across 53,000 schools throughout Pan India distribution, demonstrating its commitment to revolutionizing education at scale.

• The monolithic architecture of the LMS faced significant performance bottlenecks, particularly during peak periods. During high-demand periods, the system’s response times increased, affecting the user experience for online teachers.
• The lack of a modular design in EDIndia’s LMS created significant scaling challenges, preventing the platform from efficiently handling peak user loads during mock tests and training sessions. This scalability issue disrupted access for teachers, limiting its ability to grow and meet increasing demands. Scaling efforts were slow, often taking days to meet spikes in user demand. This inefficiency led to a degraded experience for users during peak traffic.
• The absence of automated failover mechanisms increased the risk of outages. Students who relied on the LMS faced service disruptions during critical periods of use.
• Centralized management of the LMS infrastructure, including database maintenance and system monitoring, lacked a real-time dashboard. This led to extensive manual effort each month, delayed issue resolution, and frequent SLA breaches.
• Manual patching and compliance checks exposed the system to vulnerabilities, leading to security incidents annually and putting user data at risk.
• Media management presented its own challenges. Raw video uploads often faced compatibility issues between different devices and network bandwidth, making on-demand transcoding critical. Without an automated workflow, video processing delays disrupted the availability of educational content, especially during peak periods such as mock tests and training sessions. The lack of efficient media workflows hindered the delivery of seamless learning experiences.

To enhance EDIndia’s LMS scalability, availability, and media management, a cloud-native AWS architecture was implemented. A microservices-based design using Amazon ECS enabled auto-scaling to handle peak user loads efficiently, reducing response times. AWS Elemental MediaConvert automated video transcoding for seamless media delivery across devices, ensuring uninterrupted learning. Amazon CloudFront distributed educational content globally with low latency. A real-time monitoring dashboard via Amazon CloudWatch improved incident resolution, reducing manual effort and SLA breaches.

Application Hosting:

Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service), integrated with Linux EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances in an Auto Scaling Group (ASG), was used to host the LMS. ECS enabled containerized application management and simplified scaling based on user demand, ensuring fault tolerance and responsiveness even during peak loads. This setup guaranteed high availability and seamless performance of the LMS, providing a reliable experience for end users. With dynamic scaling, the system handled increases in user traffic without degradation in performance.

Database:

A multi-node MongoDB database was hosted on an EC2 instance within a private subnet to ensure secure access. While designed for simplicity, this setup was optimized for the current application requirements and could be scaled in the future as demand grew. Hosting the database in a private network ensured data protection and prevented unauthorized access. This setup was also capable of scaling to handle significantly higher data loads as demand increased.

Storage & Backup:

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) served as the backbone of EdIndia’s storage infrastructure, efficiently managing a variety of file types essential for the LMS platform. In addition to storing course documents in PDF format, S3 stored raw video content, transcoded media files, course materials, and interactive learning resources. Lifecycle policies were implemented to optimize storage costs, ensuring efficient data management. The primary file formats used included HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and MP4. For backup and disaster recovery, regular AMI (Amazon Machine Image) and EBS (Elastic Block Storage) snapshots provided point-in-time recovery, maintaining a minimal recovery time objective.

Networking:

A dedicated Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) was set up in the Mumbai region to isolate resources and enhance security. Public subnets hosted Internet-facing components, such as the Application Load Balancer (ALB), which ensured high availability and efficient traffic distribution while also handling SSL termination. Private subnets housed sensitive resources like the MongoDB database. A NAT Gateway provided secure Internet access for private resources, allowing updates and patches while preventing inbound traffic.

Monitoring & Logging:

Amazon CloudWatch provided real-time monitoring, reducing anomaly detection times. AWS CloudTrail ensured an audit trail for compliance and security, capturing all account activity logs.

Automation & Deployment:

AWS CloudFormation was used to automate resource provisioning, ensuring consistent, error-free, and repeatable infrastructure deployments. GitHub Actions facilitated continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), streamlining the delivery of application updates without downtime and ensuring rapid feature rollouts. AWS CloudFormation automated resource provisioning, reducing deployment times. GitHub Actions integrated CI/CD pipelines, enabling the rollout of new features with zero downtime.

Content Delivery & DNS:

Amazon CloudFront accelerated content delivery by caching data at edge locations, reducing latency and improving user experience for global audiences. Route 53 provided reliable DNS management ensuring uninterrupted access to the LMS.

Media Transcoding:

AWS Elemental MediaConvert enabled high-quality video transcoding to ensure seamless playback across various devices. By optimizing educational content for different platforms, it enhanced user engagement and accessibility. Uploaded videos were processed efficiently, guaranteeing compatibility for playback on user devices.

Container Image Management:

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) efficiently managed container images, including converted applications, with seamless CI/CD integration using GitHub Actions. This streamlined deployments, reduced errors, and enhanced scalability and reliability.

• By moving to a scalable AWS architecture, EdIndia significantly reduced system downtime, enabled faster rollout of updates, and strengthened its ability to support large spikes in user traffic, ensuring a seamless experience for teachers across the platform.
• User experience improved notably thanks to a modular design and enhanced system performance.
• AWS’s dynamic scaling capabilities boosted traffic management efficiency, helping to avoid operational delays during periods of highest demand.
• Automated failover mechanisms ensured 99.9% uptime, reduced service disruptions, and positively impacted over 5 million students indirectly.
• Operational workloads decreased substantially due to automated monitoring and maintenance, freeing up resources and improving service level compliance in most incidents.
• The shift to an automated AWS-driven media processing workflow resolved video compatibility challenges, reduced delays in preparing content, and ensured educational materials were consistently available during high-traffic times. On-demand transcoding and optimized workflows also made content more accessible, improving the learning experience for teachers and students alike.

 

• Finally, the implementation of these measures led to a significant drop in security incidents, better protecting sensitive user data and reducing compliance risks.

• Access Management : To ensure secure access to AWS resources, fine-grained permissions were implemented using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). This minimized unnecessary permissions and limited access based on roles. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) was enabled for all users, adding an additional layer of protection against unauthorized access to accounts and sensitive resources.
• Network Security : All resources were deployed within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to provide isolation and controlled access. This setup ensured internal communication remained secure and external access was tightly managed. Security Groups and Network ACLs (NACLs) were configured to define explicit rules for inbound and outbound traffic, effectively minimizing the attack surface and protecting resources from unauthorized network access.
• Data Security : To protect sensitive data, encryption was implemented at multiple levels. Data at rest, including files stored in S3 and MongoDB on EC2, was encrypted to prevent unauthorized access even if storage was compromised. Data in transit was secured using SSL/TLS protocols to ensure safe communication between users and servers. AWS Key Management Service (KMS) was used for managing encryption keys securely, enhancing the reliability and compliance of data protection mechanisms.