UCAS has second successful year using cloud computing technologies

Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing technology successfully supported UCAS in its delivery of the university admissions process for the second year running. After successfully performing around 700 million test transactions, on A Level results day AWS’s infrastructure allowed UCAS to place almost 400,000 students into higher education, cope with more than 230 log-ins per second and support more than 350,000 course searches.

After a successful A Level Results Day in 2013, UCAS has expanded their use of AWS to include their application platform giving Amazon cloud technology responsibility for the majority of their critical back-end infrastructure for results day. This allowed UCAS to dramatically scale up its infrastructure, giving universities a robust technology platform from which to efficiently place UK students.

UCAS, part of the UK’s critical national infrastructure that matches students to universities, processes over 2.5 million applications every year for 700,000 prospective students across the UK, and beyond, helping them gain access to more than 350 UK universities and colleges. This makes UCAS, for one day in August, one of the most accessed websites in the UK. The pay-as-you-go, flexible and scalable nature of AWS allows UCAS to scale up to meet the demand of students, and universities, and only pay for the capacity used. This eliminates the need to have expensive technology hardware sitting around, lying idle until the same day next August.

Cloud computing technology is core to UCAS’s strategy to continually improve the university admissions experience, ensure the fairness of the Clearing system and make the process as stress-free for students and as efficient for universities as possible. Using AWS UCAS is able to spin up a technology infrastructure that would rival most FTSE 100 enterprises for the 10 days prior to results day in order to process University admissions on time.

James Munson, Director of IT at UCAS said, “In 2013, we chose to move the core of the UCAS Confirmation and Clearing process to the Amazon Web Services cloud and the system worked very well therefore we have continued to expand our use of AWS. AWS run a key part of our back-end system which gives us flexibility and almost unlimited capacity of cloud computing in order to scale to meet the extreme demands at the peak of the admissions cycle.”

Munson continues, “With the number of applicants continuing to grow we are investing for the future to ensure UCAS delivers the best service to the students and universities of the UK. Both students and universities expect a high level of service with their admissions process and cloud computing from AWS is a technology that we rely on.”

In order to ensure the smooth running of the UCAS admissions service the organisation is utilising AWS’ European Region in Dublin and is taking advantage of Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling and Amazon Relational Database Service.