Virtual Training Labs Software: Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Management

About

The pandemic moved education around the world online. Despite the wide variety of tools and technologies available, many educational institutions failed to organize distance learning quickly and effectively. The fact is that most cloud platforms are not designed for this purpose: they are hard to use and provide too many excessive features.

Therefore, there is an urgent need for a system with an easy-to-understand interface that would make the interaction between cloud service providers and educators easier and more effective.

Challenge

Therefore, there is an urgent need for a system with an easy-to-understand interface that would make the interaction between cloud service providers and educators easier and more effective.

Solution

Softarex has developed Axis* — an application for virtual lab management. It runs over AWS Elastic Beanstalk and uses Redis for the synchronization of distributed resources.

Axis allows users to deploy virtual training labs to one of the 3 top cloud vendors — AWS, GCP, and Azure. The user can choose the service provider best suited to their needs, or use more than one if the training has specific lab requirements. An intuitive interface with understandable elements makes the app easy to use both for tech-savvy users and newbies. The application provides a billing system that offers three billing options: subscription-based charging, pay-per-use charging, and a combination of the two. Thanks to the integration with APIs, the billing process is ever-faster and hassle-free.

Project Results

Axis allows users to achieve:

Real-time student learning monitoring;
Optimized performance;
High speed of operations;
Cost savings on cloud computing services thanks to the app’s usage-based billing model and the possibility to negotiate pricing directly with the provider;
Secure access to virtual labs using firewall-friendly protocols.

Technical challenges

Development of a high availability application working on a distributed cluster and tightly integrated into the user ecosystem;
Implementation of support of multiple cloud providers;
Development of a complex mechanism-scheduler that allows controlling both individual and groups of virtual machines;
Configuration of the environment (networks (according to RFC1918), subnets, firewall rule, the interaction between networks and subnets, the ability to set a static IP address to virtual machines.