Building a first-class university cannot be realized without the support of informatization. In recent years, Shaanxi University of Science and Technology has been highlighting the IT infrastructure construction and the promotion of innovative information applications. Previously, the university's self-built data center was built with virtualization technology, running 100-odd virtual servers to support different application modules and services of university administrative affairs informatization. IT O&M team of the Application Technology Department of Shaanxi University of Science and Technology was awakened by an IT accident in December 2017, noticing the bottleneck in the traditional information construction modes. "As exams and holidays are approaching, December is the peak period for university information system, when we were confronted with repeated restart of multiple servers, resulting in the failure of the core database. After careful troubleshooting, we found that there was a physical failure in the storage device. However, as the warranty period of the equipment has expired, if the original factory is requested to provide maintenance services, it will not only take a long time, but also require the financial department of the university to allocate a large sum of money to renew the warranty. For an institution such as a university, the budget, approval and application of funds shall go through strict procedures, which raises the difficulty level of storage failure problem. " said Chen Feng, Department of Applied Technology under Information and Network Management Center of Shaanxi University of Science and Technology. For Shaanxi University of Science and Technology, traditional data centers face expensive cost, high O&M pressure, and elasticity and reliability insufficiency. To maintain the stable operation of the system, a large amount of funds needs to be invested, and unlike enterprises, it will be very difficult for universities with strict budget system to allocate additional funds for emergencies. With the university's mobile service platform and the launch of the new all-purpose card and other applications that are still under planning, the deployment of new services requires more efforts from the IT team to deploy and optimize from the aspects of hardware, software and systems. As a result, the university’s IT teams need to seek new approaches to configure IT resources.

To choose a cloud service provider, Shaanxi University of Science and Technology made a careful and detailed comparison of several brands in the market and finally chose Amazon Web Services . The reason for making such a choice is on the strength of Amazon Web Services in the following aspects:

By using Amazon Web Services to replace the traditional obsolete on-premises data center and virtualization platform, Shaanxi University of Science and Technology has gained benefits in multiple aspects.

First, the traditional procurement method of IT resources has changed to help the university reduce costs. After Amazon Web Services is adopted, Shaanxi University of Science and Technology can use IT resources on demand and on a pay-per-use model, instead of purchasing hardware and software in advance and planning for capacity as in traditional on-premises virtualized environments. "Now, when the university is about to launching applications, we can complete the deployment on Amazon Web Services in just a few hours and omit the complicated financial approval process, which has shifted the IT cost of the university from the traditional expensive fixed asset investment to the current service leasing mode, greatly relieving the pressure on the financial department of the university, and we are no more concerned about depreciation or subsequent maintenance of equipment, " Teacher Chen Feng said. "For the IT team, the high SLA service provided by Amazon Web Services is beyond the reach of our on-premises self-built data center, but now we can obtain the high SLA provided by Amazon Web Services with very low cost for cloud services, which is very cost-effective for the university. "

Second,the workload of IT O&M teams has significantly been reduced, allowing the university IT teams to devote more energy to long-term strategic planning and university informatization. "Amazon Web Services provides not only all kinds of hosted services, but also tools for automated O&M and deployment. With the help of Amazon CloudWatch, we can easily and intuitively monitor applications, understand and respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and view operations in a unified view. Previously, we needed 4 persons to manage our on-premises virtualized environment; after with Amazon Web Services cloud service, we only need 1 person to monitor the service to ensure the stable operation of the environment, " Teacher Chen Feng said. "Now, the IT team of the university can focus more on the strategic trend of the university's future information construction and introduce more innovative technologies including mobile applications and IoT on the campus information platform to better serve teachers and students. "

Fig. 1 is a schematic diagram for the Amazon Web Services-based system architecture of Shaanxi University of Science and Technology, using the Amazon Web Services services including: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Storage Gateway, Amazon DMS, Amazon RDS for Oracle, CloudWatch, etc.

More than that, Amazon Web Services also enables Shaanxi University of Science and Technology to use innovative cloud technologies to drive teaching and research as well as curriculum reform so as to enhance the core competencies of graduates. Relying on the successful application of Amazon Web Services services, Shaanxi University of Science and Technology decided to join the Amazon Web Services Academy program. The Department of Applied Technology of the university has planned to cooperate with all its faculties to introduce the latest cloud computing knowledge into the university's computer courses that to be combined with the development of hands-on practical ability to enable students to acquire complete cloud computing skills and certification. "The contents in the Amazon Web Services Academy course can be integrated with the university's existing curriculum system, so that students can better understand cloud computing knowledge in line with the trend of the times and make sufficient preparations for future employment or entrepreneurship, " said Chen Feng, Department of Applied Technology under Center of Information and Network Management of Shaanxi University of Science and Technology. "The university itself has a production environment for university administrative affairs services deployed on Amazon Web Services. Combined with what Amazon Web Services Academy provides, we can reduce the gap between industries and universities in teaching practice, and students can understand the value of cloud computing more intuitively, so that our students can be more confident in using cloud technology in the future workplace to open up wider employment and entrepreneurial opportunities for them. "

In the future, Shaanxi University of Science and Technology plans to migrate most of its applications like teaching and scientific research programs to Amazon Web Services, and actively adopt Amazon Lambda to realize serverless application deployment. At that time, the university only needs to upload the code of the new app to realize the operation in the cloud. In addition, with the deepening application of Amazon Web Services Cloud services in Shaanxi University of Science and Technology, the parties will continue to work together in cloud computing technology support for IT innovation, teaching and scientific research and other fields of the university, and choose the right time to jointly create a "Cloud Innovation Academy", so as to help the university students' innovation and entrepreneurship with Amazon Web Services’s advanced cloud computing experience and technology, and provide impetus for the development of higher education in the western area.