Case Study: Open Universities Australia achieves continuous delivery and scalable cloud operations with Amazon SES

Open Universities Australia - Customer Case Study

Open Universities Australia (OUA), a distance‑education provider serving hundreds of thousands of students, faced scalability, maintenance, and release‑cycle problems running on a collocated data center—test/dev provisioning could take up to three months, the infrastructure couldn’t handle enrolment spikes, and the IT team was tied up in routine work rather than enabling continuous delivery. To modernize, OUA moved to the Amazon Web Services portfolio and adopted services including Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, AWS CloudFormation and Amazon SES.

As part of the AWS migration (with Amazon SES integrated into the architecture), OUA standardized and automated environments, redeploying legacy apps and using CloudFormation, Chef, S3, SQS, ElastiCache and Elasticsearch to enable continuous delivery. The move cut environment provisioning from three months to under two hours, delivered releases almost daily, improved website performance up to 20%, supported peak loads (about 1,800 page views and 200 transactions/hour), and enabled plans to reduce infrastructure costs by up to 30%—all achieved with support from Amazon SES and the broader AWS services.

Open Universities Australia

Erik van Eekelen

Chief Information Officer