Métrica Educativa has developed over three decades a variety of evaluation instruments, as well as computer programs that have contributed to educational institutions having systematic, transparent and reliable admission processes. To do this, they have worked to offer diagnostic and normative exams, aimed at identifying strengths and weaknesses in student learning, as well as selecting the best applicants who wish to enter an educational institution.
The evaluation and support services for the project were provided by Nubosoft.
Nubosoft is a Google Cloud Premier Partner focused on the Mexican market and experienced in thousands of Google Cloud implementations.
The challenge
Given the situation of COVID-19 in the current year 2020, all schools were forced to delay their evaluation processes in the face-to-face modality. As a result, the Métrica Educativa team was looking for new solutions to carry out the evaluations to the students. Faced with the need and urgency, the Métrica Educativa technical team came to the conclusion of using Moodle, an open source educational platform designed for online education. The technical team used the exam settings, in conjunction with extensions for control that prevents academic dishonesty.
Once the software for the application of exams was determined, the next challenge that the technical team of Metrica Educativa encountered was to determine the appropriate infrastructure implementation.
The solution
Given the need to apply tests to different groups of students, they looked for a Moodle configuration in which groups of more than 2000 students can be supported concurrently. It was clear to rule out using vertical scaling (one server with high resources assigned) due to the cost involved, and it was decided to look for a scalable and easily managed configuration.
Métrica Educativa contacted the Nubosoft team, and worked together to design and configure an architecture that can scale automatically and can be configured with ease for different schools, which was implemented within Google Cloud. To fulfill the requirements, Moodle was configured to use external data sources, because of the life cycle during a escalation, to have data persistence among the VMs in an instance group. As a result, it was required to use Cloud SQL with MySQL as the database, Redis as a mem-store for caché and sessions, Filestore as a shared folder for blob files). A Load Balancer was used to use SSL certificates in the frontend and the instance group as the backend with an auto-scale configuration ruled by maximum RPS and CPU utilization per VM.
Considering that Métrica Educativa team had bad experiences when trying to implement a similar infrastructure with other cloud providers, they are now surprised with the results of reliability at a very competitive and affordable investment cost.
