Distance Learning Platform with Plone on AWS

CHALLENGE

Central New Mexico Community College (who had previously engaged Six Feet Up for a Plone Upgrade) was looking to implement a distance learning platform in Plone. The College was curious but wary of the cloud, and wanted to set this site up using serverless architecture as a proof of concept for potentially moving more of their infrastructure to the cloud. Six Feet Up collaborated with their developers to build the infrastructure for this project on AWS.

Implementation Details

AWS Native Services

The new infrastructure was built using AWS native cloud services. A full implementation of Plone on AWS requires several components including:

RDS Multi-AZ Database for database storage
EFS filesystems for Plone blob storage management
ELB for load balancing
CloudFront for front end distribution.
EC2 for the Plone app server and HAProxy
S3 Buckets for Backups

Six Feet Up made use of its AWS expertise to orchestrate all of these services and serve the learning platform to students all over the country and around the world.

Infrastructure as Code

Several Terraform models were created to quickly build up and keep track of the infrastructure of the project. This allows for a single point of truth for all the different AWS services that are required to serve the platform most efficiently. (Learn more about Terraform)

Collaboration

Throughout the project, the team at Six Feet Up collaborated extensively with the CNM developers. The client team wrote the content, design, and theming for the Plone site, while the Six Feet Up team built the AWS infrastructure used to serve the site.

RESULTS

Central New Mexico Community College now has an online learning platform that is resilient, scalable, and blazing fast thanks to the new backend built on AWS-native services by Six Feet Up. The platform has performed reliably and has had continuous uptime since its launch, often outperforming the traditional monolithic architecture other services run on.