EDMC AWS Cloud Integration

Background #

EDMC, a for-profit educational institution, with over 100 campuses used AWS for powering their marketing sites and storing course materials.

I was a member of the systems administrator team from 2012 to 2017.

Project Requirements #

The technology staff needed a single sign-on solution to manage the infrastructure as well as automated backups of storage volumes.

In addition, they were manually creating course FTP sites to serve as storage space for student projects and assignments. This wanted to automate this process and replace the FTP sites with a more secure cloud storage solution.

Solutions #

Created solutions that integrated with AWS services for access management, servers, and storage.

MFA SSO authentication #

Developed a single sign-on solution that allowed technology staff to login to AWS management console using their Active Directory credentials and Google Authenticator code for multi-factor authentication. Users were assigned IAM roles based on their Active Directory security groups.

EBS snapshot backups #

Nightly cron job used the AWS SDK to create daily backups of all active storage volumes across all regions. It then applied retention rules based on values defined in tags.

On-demand provisioning of S3 buckets for courses #

Used by course instructors as storage space for projects and assignments by students. Automation retrieved course information from the course management database.