Case Study: Open Universities Australia achieves continuous delivery and rapid, scalable infrastructure with Amazon Web Services

Open Universities Australia - Customer Case Study

Open Universities Australia (OUA) is a not-for-profit provider of distance and online higher education that also operates the Open2Study MOOC platform. Running its websites and back-end systems in a collocated data center left OUA with limited scalability, long provisioning times (up to three months for test/dev), high maintenance overhead, and inadequate elasticity to handle enrolment spikes—constraints that prevented the move to a continuous-delivery model.

OUA migrated its systems to AWS, using services such as EC2, RDS, CloudFormation and Chef to standardize, automate, and secure environments. The move cut environment setup from three months to under two hours, enabled daily releases, improved website performance by up to 20%, supports peak traffic without issues, and is expected to reduce infrastructure costs by up to 30% (around AU$1M) while freeing IT to focus on higher-value work.

Open Universities Australia

Jose Herrera-Perea

Executive General Manager, Open2Study