From Monolithic Systems to a Federated e-Learning Cloud System

Pervasive high speed networks and emerging cloud computing concepts offer a new capability and an opportunity to rethink approaches for delivering information services. However, little attention has been paid to how the legacy monolithic systems can be migrated to the cloud computing paradigm. The paper shares our experience and solutions on building a federated cloud infrastructure for E-learning services. The federated cloud system provides the ability to integrate, manage, and use third-party resources from multiple institutions and combines the resources into one infrastructure. We also provide experience and performance data from six month real trace of the system. While the discussion and experiments focus on cloud paradigm with education services, this research can serve as a reference design for other service providers who want to deploy services in the form of cloud computing.