Implementation of an E-Learning Platform in Hybrid Clouds

Abstract

The provision of computing facilities and services has been revolutionized by cloud computing where virtual resources that are scalable are increasingly offered as services over the internet. Starting out as provision of Software as a Service (SaaS), cloud computing has evolved to Platform as a Service (PaaS) whereby scalable, large-scale computing resources such as data centers are offered as services to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) where a complete computing infrastructure and computing resources are integrated as a service to clients. The application model of hybrid clouds including public clouds and private clouds is current mainstream of cloud technology with various advantages such as elastic computing resource, load balance, geo-replication (like those from public cloud), safety, privacy and cost effectiveness (like those from private cloud). Based on previous work on cloud-based electronic design automation for integrated circuit design, implementation of an e-learning platform in hybrid clouds using Eucalyptus private cloud and Openshift public cloud is performed in this study. There are eight virtual machines in private cloud and the same number of virtual machines in public cloud. Each virtual machine in the hybrid clouds is running with Linux operating system, Nginx HTTP server, Wordpress CMS, and shared MySQL database. In hybrid clouds outside sixteen virtual machines, an additional Nginx reverse proxy is running for load balancing due to mass visiting request. In this study, e-learning platform is developed with using Wordpress CMS and PHP language to realize various functions such user identification, WYSIWYG course authoring, video & audio learning material with text, online quiz, and discussion. The Eucalyptus, Openshift, Nginx, Wordpress, and MySQL utilized in this study are all free open source codes that much improvements of the e-learning platform in hybrid clouds is very possible for future works.