KNUST AWS Experience

September 2022
Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast City Accra
Outline
• Background
• IT Infrastructure at KNUST
• Challenges
• Why AWS?
• The Experience so far
• Way Forward

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Background
• Established in 1952 as the Kumasi College of Technology.​
• Was later transformed into a full-fledged university, the Kwame Nkrumah
University of Science and Technology, by an Act of Parliament on 22 August
1961.​
• Strategic Pillars:​Teaching, Research, and Service to Society
• KNUST is the premier science and technology university in Ghana with focus on
STEM
• Student population: 90,000+.
• KNUST was recently adjudged the best university in quality education in Africa
and 14th globally the by Times Higher Education impact ranking in 2022

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IT infrastructure at KNUST
• As of January 2020, KNUST hosted almost all its IT services at its data
centre. These included all websites and information systems such as
the Learning Management System (Moodle)
• Previously, websites at KNUST were hosted in the pubic cloud.
• KNUST is in the process of upgrading its Data Centre to a tier 3 data
centre
• Total internet bandwidth is 6.2 gbps for about 100k students and staff.
• Students have access to campus WiFi

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Challenges
• We started experiencing problems with our Learning Management System
(Moodle) at the height of Covid-19 when all learning moved online.
• Existing infrastructure could not support connections by over 80,000 students
• There wasn’t sufficient capacity to store lecture videos, images, and files
• Procurement delays meant that we could not easily solve this problem quickly
• Students and Faculty were always complaining of connection problems
• Team was setup to recommend a solution

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The Solution
Virtual Classroom

Student
Online Library
Management System

Video/Web Institutional Resource

Conferencing System Management System
SUPPORT
SYSTEMS

Electronic Document Automated Institutional

Server Timetabling System

Mailing &
Collaborative Suite
Why AWS?
• AWS is market leader in Cloud Computing with 33% market share as
of 2021 Q1.
• Quickly scale up resources when needed to meet demand
• Training by AWS experts on best practices
• Availability of technical support
• Very reliable platform: High availability, redundacy and security

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The Experience so far
• Easily scaled up and down resources when needed. Recently used it
for room allocation
• Security architecture is solid
• Staff have received exceptional Cloud Computing training from AWS
and its partners
• Autoscaling and Loading Balancing is one of the exceptional feature of
being on AWS
• System downtime is a thing of the past
• Automated Backups

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Way Forward
• Internet connectivity and our current investments in IT infrastructure
means we cannot move fully to the cloud at the moment
• Internet costs are very high
• Latency is also a big issue
• A hybrid architecuture that combines the power of on-premise and
cloud infrastructure is the best balance to ensure high availability of
our IT Services

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Thank You!

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