Salahaddin University-Erbil (SUE) is a prestigious public university in Iraq. It is well-known for its efforts in strategic development and social services.
SUE previously had several of their applications hosted by a medium-sized application hosting company. However, the number of users had reached 50,000, and accommodating all of these users was a huge challenge, especially at the end of a semester when exam results were released, as it would mean a spike in user visits.
The application hosting platform gave SUE minimal visibility and control over performance bottlenecks, and did not allow SUE to scale efficiently during traffic spikes or monitor the environment.
To solve these pain points, Huawei Cloud tasked a local team to assist SUE in performing a migration assessment to better understand the application landscape and usage patterns, including the functions and importance of each application. Then different priorities were given to different applications during migration, which was performed phase by phase.
Mission-critical applications were migrated to the cloud without redesigning application components. With the help of a Huawei Cloud partner, SUE managed to migrate three mission-critical applications to Huawei Cloud Elastic Cloud Server (ECS) in just one week. Huawei Cloud's elastic scaling feature enabled SUE to scale out or in according to fluctuations in traffic.
To optimize the architecture for efficient operations, Huawei Cloud's technical team recommended splitting the application platform into smaller modules. The modular approach contributes to fewer points of failure, less interdependence among applications, and refined monitoring. The three monolithic environments could, for example, be split into seven separate environments deployed on smaller ECSs. Deployment of sub-components on smaller ECSs is more convenient and flexible when using Image Management Service (IMS), which facilitates deployment and re-deployment, testing, and upgrade of application components for faster roll-out.
With the management and governance services offered by smaller ECSs, SUE can now control and monitor the system more effectively. The log monitoring feature of Cloud Trace Service (CTS) allows for monitoring specific keywords extracted from login logs, and generating alarms when malicious login attempts are detected. In addition, the network traffic metrics of ECSs are monitored every minute to identify network bottlenecks in advance.
After migrating to Huawei Cloud, SUE's platform has achieved high availability and eliminated outages on student portals, which used to suffer from 48-hour outages on average each quarter.
When 25,000 students were checking their exam results on the system at the same time, it used to take the page 5 minutes to load. Now, students can see their results within 10 seconds, even during spikes in traffic.
Highly elastic Huawei Cloud services allow SUE to shut down the servers of some applications during off-peak periods such as holidays to reduce costs by 30% to 40%.
Partnering with Huawei Cloud, SUE will continue cultivating talent with national and even international influence. As a result-driven university, SUE remains committed to academic excellence and the sound development of individuals ─ goals that Huawei Cloud is more than able to assist with.