Design and Implementation of an Education Cloud

Abstract

Cloud computing has arisen as a promising solution to address the challenges of scalability, reliability, and system agility. While cloud computing promise a new capability and an opportunity for delivering information services, little attention has been paid to how the legacy software systems can be deployed as cloud services. This paper shares our experiences and solutions on building an education cloud for creating e-learning services. With the education cloud system, new e-learning services can be efficiently launched on demand by deploying a service instance via dynamically allocating the necessary resources. We also provide performance data and experience from the proposed system with real production services. Although this paper focuses on the cloud paradigm with education services, the challenges addressed in this paper are common for other Internet services and service providers who want to deploy services in the cloud. We also point out interesting issues and concerns for further research.