FMU: Integrating Moodle and Google Cloud to provide users with stability and security
About FMU
The FMU University Center offers affordable higher education focused on science, culture, technology, and humanities. Founded over 50 years ago, it currently has 75,000 students distributed across in-person and online courses.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Calriz
Operating in the market as an IT integrator, Calriz is a company that helps its customers enhance their applications and infrastructure.
Supported by Calriz, FMU now ensures a more modern, cloud-based architecture with higher access speed and scalability.
Google Cloud results
- Seamless server setup and successful data processing
- Higher cost predictability with savings amounting to 55%
- Real-time task monitoring, leading to quality deliveries
- Applications available 24/7, resulting in efficiency
Nearly 75,000 students use the platform simultaneously
The FMU University Center, founded in 1968, provides its students with affordable, top-quality higher education, focused on science, culture, technology, and humanities. Based in São Paulo, this institution has nearly 75,000 students distributed across in-person and online courses.
A fast-growing organization, FMU now has 340 education centers across Brazil, as well as 1,700 administrative and academic employees. Consequently, one of the main challenges the institution’s IT team faced was to align service quality with the University Center’s growth strategy, especially for online education, due to soaring demand during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As the education market was transformed by post-pandemic adaptations, FMU decided to support these changes by balancing IT initiatives focused on the return of in-person lessons without ignoring the needs of online education.
In 2021, when FMU first started to use cloud technologies, it was looking to speed up processes and make its former online education platform more flexible. However, the institution was unable to achieve these goals with either the cloud provider it was using or its e-learning platform.
Besides several frequent issues, such as low speeds, high costs, and the lack of adequate support by its cloud provider, FMU realized it needed to migrate to improve scalability, especially for test periods, when students’ virtual access soared from 50 to over 25,000 connected users, for instance.
"Costs varied enormously every month, and we needed to predict them. That’s why we chose Google Cloud to improve our cost-efficiency and scalability, as well as to prioritise a more modern architecture."
—Rafael Citelli de Farias, CTO, FMUStability guaranteed by a reliable infrastructure
In September 2022, after taking part in the event LATAM Education Expedition, organized by Google Cloud, FMU was in a better position to understand the benefits of migration. And then the support provided by partner Calriz was key to delivering a plan to ensure reliability along this new innovation journey.
"Calriz supported the design of the new FMU infrastructure by means of working parties, daily activity sessions, and hands-on training. There were a lot of lessons learnt: we redefined processes and facilitated development to make deployment simple, automated, and robust."
—Cyrano Rizzo, CEO, CalrizAnother significant step taken by FMU was integration between the cloud and Moodle, one of the world’s leading e-learning platforms. Google Cloud engineers developed an open-source, cloud-native approach for FMU to host Moodle, replacing the legacy platform.
This decision brought the integrated, highly scalable services of both Google Cloud and Moodle together to deliver a more modern, easy-to-manage, and cost-efficient rollout. As a result, FMU managed to focus its efforts on the migration and on leveraging these solutions together.
The support provided by Calriz was critical as it unlocked advanced technical knowledge on Moodle and Google Cloud. This partner helped the institution customize the necessary settings to meet the demands of FMU’s production environment, thus mitigating any error in the applications.
"Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is an IT star, and Cloud Load Balancing is the necessary driver to access GKE. Moodle files, on the other hand, are hosted in a Filestore version, which we can access dynamically. And Memorystore is used for storing user data," explains Cyrano Rizzo.
The new infrastructure enables FMU’s IT team to provide its students and faculty members with on-demand cloud resources and data storage solutions, as well as to deploy applications fast and unlock other services that support learning processes.
"Google Cloud helps us deliver secure and reliable storage and backup solutions to guarantee that our institution’s data are protected and properly backed up in the event of an emergency or disaster," says Rafael Citelli de Farias.
Benefits obtained in the short run
Despite completing its migration recently, FMU has already seen many advantages from the integration between Moodle and Google Cloud, including a more modern architecture, higher access speed, and more scalability in the environment.
Thanks to a monthly budget allocation, the team could save around 55% in costs. Proper server setup, successful data processing and real-time task monitoring, generating top quality for deliveries, were other benefits highlighted by FMU’s CTO.
Moreover, applications are available on a 24/7 basis, which leads to efficiency. The infrastructure team also improved productivity thanks to Google Cloud’s resources related to service and server management, which are easy to use.
"Our main concern, which was the number of concurrent users during tests, is no longer a risk for us. Today, we have up to 75,000 students seamlessly using Moodle at the same time. Thanks to Google Cloud, we have the necessary peace of mind and confidence to focus on incorporating other solutions."
—Rafael Citelli de Farias, CTO, FMUIn the near future, FMU intends to be fully operating in the cloud, harnessing tools that modernize the way it communicates with students and faculty members. This mission also extends to more specific action at the data layer, structuring data and creating an Education Data Platform to streamline processes and offer students better support.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About FMU
The FMU University Center offers affordable higher education focused on science, culture, technology, and humanities. Founded over 50 years ago, it currently has 75,000 students distributed across in-person and online courses.
About Calriz
Operating in the market as an IT integrator, Calriz is a company that helps its customers enhance their applications and infrastructure.