Directorate of Technical Education – Tamil Nadu
Migration and Modernization of DoTE LMS Application on AWS
Project Overview
The Directorate of Technical Education (DoTE), Government of Tamil Nadu, oversees engineering and technical institutions across the state. Its education application manages large volumes of student records, examination data, institution management, and academic workflows.
The existing on-premises environment faced challenges related to scalability, performance, and high availability, particularly during peak academic cycles.
DoTE partnered with Ilios Digital, an AWS Partner, to modernize its education application and migrate it to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The modernization aimed to support more than 200,000 concurrent users, reduce operational overhead, and strengthen security, governance, and compliance.
Project Objectives
Modernize the legacy education application using scalable AWS services.
Support large volumes of student, institutional, and examination data.
Ensure high availability, performance, and operational efficiency.
Strengthen security, governance, and monitoring using AWS services.
Reduce downtime and improve application reliability during academic workloads.
Enable future modernization through microservices and containerization.
Solution Overview
The modernization involved designing a multi-account AWS Landing Zone, deploying the DoTE ERP/LMS application on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), migrating databases to managed database services, and implementing centralized monitoring and automated operational workflows.
The solution uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for relational database workloads and MongoDB Atlas for NoSQL data management.
AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) Phases:
Assess
Mobilize
Migrate
Modernize
Architecture Overview
Detailed Components
Amazon EKS
Application Clusters and Worker Nodes
Hosts ERP and LMS application services using managed Kubernetes clusters.
Amazon EC2 node groups provide scalable compute capacity across multiple Availability Zones.
Supports high availability through auto-scaling, health checks, and rolling updates.
Uses least-privilege security groups and IAM roles for controlled service access.
Amazon RDS and MongoDB Atlas
Managed Database Services
Amazon RDS manages core ERP transactional data, user records, workflows, and module configurations.
MongoDB Atlas manages NoSQL datasets, flexible ERP module data, and dynamic collections.
Multi-AZ Amazon RDS deployment supports high availability and automatic failover.
Automated backups, point-in-time recovery (PITR), and encryption protect database workloads.
Amazon S3
Document and Content Storage
Stores ERP documents, LMS content, logs, static files, and configuration backups.
Provides durable object storage with lifecycle policies for cost optimization.
Supports log archiving and application artifact retention.
Application Load Balancer
Traffic Distribution and Health Management
Distributes incoming user traffic across application workloads running on Amazon EKS.
Performs health checks and routes traffic away from unhealthy application targets.
Integrates with AWS WAF for additional application security.
AWS WAF
Web Application Security
Protects the ERP application against SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and common web exploits.
Integrates with Application Load Balancer for incoming traffic filtering.
Amazon Route 53 and AWS Certificate Manager
DNS and SSL/TLS Management
Amazon Route 53 manages DNS routing for the ERP application domain.
AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) provisions and manages SSL/TLS certificates for secure HTTPS access.
Security
Access Control and Encryption
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles enforce least-privilege access.
Data encryption at rest for Amazon S3 and Amazon RDS, and encryption in transit using SSL/TLS.
API Gateway supports controlled application API access.
Monitoring and Logging
Observability and Auditing
Amazon CloudWatch provides real-time monitoring, metrics, and alerts.
AWS CloudTrail records API activity for auditing and security analysis.
Amazon S3 stores access logs for centralized retention and analysis.