Mail.ru Cloud Solutions and Exam will help Russian universities hold a summer session online

2020: Migrating computing resources to the cloud platform

On June 26, 2020, it became known that the Electronic Platforms company, a developer of a service to improve the quality and objectivity of evaluating the results of the Examus remote exams, transferred computing resources to the Mail.Ru Cloud Solutions (MCS) cloud platform in order to ensure stable and correct system operation during the summer session.

Examus technologies have been helping Russian universities for five years, including, and HSE MIPT St.Petersburg State University many others, to improve quality. distance education The company's own development - an online proctoring service identifies , a student, compares biometric data with a video that is recorded by the examinee's webcam and analyzes his behavior for violation using technology facial recognition and emotion detection.

2020 turned out to be very unusual for the Russian system of higher education. formations According to him, to data Ministry of Education and Science due to the pandemic coronavirus , more than 80% of Russian universities were forced to temporarily switch to a distance learning format. In 2020, during the summer session, universities will conduct more than 100,000 exams remotely, many of which will be held under the control of the Exam system.

As of June 2020, depending on the flow, the number of single exams using the online proctoring service can reach 3,500. This implies an uneven distribution of the load on infrastructure - growth on test days and a sharp decrease in activity over the weekend and holidays. To keep the system stable, the company decided to transfer its computing power to the Mail.ru Cloud Solutions platform. According to the results of the project, it was necessary to achieve the following goals: to increase the level of service availability to 99.9%, as well as to increase the amount of capacity and resources so that the service can simultaneously take 5 times more exams.

The transition to the MCS cloud, which took just over a month, allowed you to connect an additional 30 virtual machines, the resources of which helped the company scale 10 times in terms of services and achieve the required indicators. Thanks to the built-in automatic scaling tools, the Examus service works correctly regardless of the level of load on the infrastructure: additional resources are connected at peak periods, and with low activity, the company does not have to pay for simple equipment. In addition, the personal data of students was transferred to reliable data centers certified in accordance with Federal Law 152, while maintaining safety requirements.

Exams are an important stage in the life of every student, especially when it comes to graduates. This is an opportunity to demonstrate the knowledge and professional skills that you have gained during your studies at university. Our service allows, despite the circumstances, to maintain the quality of exams. With the help of the MCS cloud platform, we can scale our services to a significantly larger number of educational institutions and help increase the objectivity of knowledge assessment, "said Dmitry Istomin, director of Examus.

We are always happy to cooperate with important socially oriented projects, such as the Exam. Our cloud will provide a good level of service availability, and unlimited capacity scaling will allow you to withstand almost any level of load, "said Ilya Letunov, head of the cloud platform Mail.ru Cloud Solutions.