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Welcome to Silicon Overdrive!

University of Pretoria – Virtual Welcome Day

About the Customer

The University of Pretoria is one of Africa’s top universities and the largest contact University in South Africa. The University provides over a thousand study programs and has over 200,000 alumni.

Every year, the University of Pretoria organizes a Welcome Day, extending a warm invitation to prospective students interested in joining the institution. In response to evolving circumstances, the university has innovatively hosted an engaging virtual Welcome Day for the past three years. The COVID-19 pandemic further fueled the demand for this online event.

In addition, the University of Pretoria ran a competition that could allow one lucky Open Day attendee the chance to win a full bursary, which would further increase traffic to the site.

The Challenge

In addition to the responsibility of organizing its yearly Welcome Day for prospective students, the University faced an additional, unforeseen obstacle: COVID-19. Due to COVID, it became impossible to host large events at the University, and they were obligated to host the Welcome Day event virtually.

Preserving its reputation was of utmost importance to the University, ensuring the flawless execution and punctuality of its Welcome Day.

To ensure the Virtual Welcome Day was successful, The University of Pretoria reached out to Silicon Overdrive, an AWS Advanced Partner, to architect an environment on AWS that could virtually accommodate over 9,000 students and handle the web traffic requirements, security, and compliance best practices.

The Solution

Silicon Overdrive architected a scalable best practice environment and integrated AWS Auto Scaling with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to scale up for the projected 9,000 concurrent students and staff on the Welcome Day event.

Due to the demand fluctuation during the event, we implemented AWS Auto Scaling to remove the overhead of adding and removing compute capacity automatically. This allowed the University to avoid unnecessary costs and scale to meet traffic demand.

The University only paid for the EC2 instances that were used and terminated them after the event, thus reducing overall spend.

The Silicon Overdrive AWS Team implemented CloudFlare CDN, in conjunction with WordPress Total Cache, to reduce the number of requests to the database and file servers. In turn, this dramatically reduced the server load, allowing for cost savings during the event.

The Outcome

During the virtual event’s peak, 12,000 concurrent students were online, exceeding the University’s expectations by 50%.

As a result of the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, the environment could automatically scale, ensuring that the University had the right amount of capacity to handle the increased traffic demand. This resulted in an exceptional student experience.

The University has better fault tolerance with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, which can detect when an instance is unhealthy, terminate it, and launch an instance to replace it. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling can also be configured to use multiple Availability Zones. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling can launch instances in another to compensate if one Availability Zone becomes unavailable.

The entire page would load at an average speed of between two to three seconds at maximum load, ensuring potential new students could access the virtual event without downtime.

The University benefited from better cost management as Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling can dynamically increase and decrease capacity as needed.

The University’s IT environment now has a well-architected best practice, scalable, secure, and compliant cloud environment on AWS. The University achieved a high level GDPR and ISO 27001 compliance, successfully meeting its business requirements.

The environment is secure for future growth and ensures that its students and staff will enjoy a seamless experience.

Dr. Srinivasu Nadupalli, Deputy Director at the University of Pretoria, said, “My experience working with the Silicon Overdrive team was exceptional and professional. They assessed our challenge and were able to deliver precisely what the University required.”

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