Enhancing Koç University’s SIS and LP Operations with AWS Managed Services

Koç University is a private, non-profit foundation research university in Istanbul, Turkey, established in 1993 and supported by the Vehbi Koç Foundation (VKF). In industry terms, it operates in the higher-education and research sector, where its core business is teaching, research production, and talent development for the economy and society. It delivers degree programs across major academic units including the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, College of Administrative Sciences and Economics, College of Sciences, College of Engineering, Law School, School of Medicine, and School of Nursing, alongside graduate institutes. The foundation describes its mission as being a “center of excellence” that brings talented young people together with accomplished faculty to contribute to science on a universal scale. The university opened on a temporary campus in İstinye in 1993 before moving to a permanent campus in Rumelifeneri in 1999. The VKF notes that the Rumeli Feneri Campus includes dozens of buildings such as classrooms, laboratories, a library, dormitories, and social/sports facilities, and it also references additional sites like Topkapı and Beyoğlu. As described by the foundation, Koç University offers 22 undergraduate programs along with master’s and doctoral programs delivered through these schools. Like other research universities, it also competes for research grants, international collaborations, and high-achieving students, making reputation and research output central to its operating model. In health sciences, Koç University Hospital extends the university into academic medicine: the foundation says it opened in September 2014 as the teaching and research hospital of the medical school, which began its first academic year in 2010–2011. That structure links education and R&D with real-world healthcare delivery, enabling clinical training and applied biomedical research alongside patient services. For commercialization and entrepreneurship, Koç University founded KWORKS in 2014, described as an entrepreneurship research center and accelerator hub that helps technology ventures move from business-model stage to investment and commercialization. Overall, Koç University sits at the intersection of higher education, research and innovation, and academic healthcare—operating as a knowledge-intensive organization whose main outputs are graduates, research, and technology-enabled impact.

Koç University faced a dual challenge: first, ensuring the continuous availability and security of its Student Information System and e-learning platform, which are among the most critical services of any higher education institution; and second, managing a growing cloud environment that had already been migrated to AWS but required professional managed services to operate reliably at scale. The university’s IT team, while technically capable, was limited in size and already stretched across ongoing modernization projects and support for multiple internal systems. Running a complex, multi-service AWS environment with containerized workloads, managed databases, global content delivery, and multi-layered security controls required dedicated operational expertise that exceeded the capacity of an in-house team managing both on-premises and cloud infrastructure simultaneously.

Enrolment periods, exam weeks, and semester openings generate sudden traffic spikes that could overwhelm static infrastructure if not proactively managed. The Student Information System and Moodle platform needed continuous scaling management, health monitoring, and rapid incident response to avoid service degradation during these critical academic windows. Any downtime during enrolment or examinations would directly disrupt the academic calendar and affect thousands of students. Beyond availability, protecting sensitive student data, academic records, and institutional information demanded continuous security operations, including web application firewall management, threat monitoring, compliance checks, and vulnerability remediation, all of which required ongoing attention rather than one-time configuration.

If these challenges were not addressed, the university risked service outages during its most critical academic periods, slower incident resolution due to limited operational coverage, potential security gaps in an environment processing student data at scale, and inefficient cloud spending without dedicated cost management. The university needed a trusted AWS Managed Service Provider capable of delivering 24/7 operational support, proactive infrastructure management, security operations, and strategic cloud advisory across its entire AWS environment.

How Commencis solved the customer challenge

Commencis addressed Koç University’s challenge by establishing a comprehensive managed services engagement covering the university’s entire AWS environment. Rather than a single-project engagement, Commencis embedded as the university’s dedicated cloud operations partner, providing continuous 24/7 monitoring, incident management, infrastructure operations, security management, and strategic advisory across all production, test, and development environments. This approach allowed the university’s IT team to focus on academic innovation and internal projects while Commencis handled the operational complexity of running mission-critical systems on AWS.

The managed services engagement covers the Student Information System and Moodle platform running as containerized workloads on Amazon EKS, the main university website running on auto-scaling Amazon EC2 instances, multiple database engines including Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and Amazon RDS for MariaDB, global content delivery through Amazon CloudFront, and a multi-layered security stack. Commencis manages the full lifecycle of these services: from cluster upgrades and node scaling to database configuration, backup management, WAF rule tuning, and cost optimization. The engagement also includes ongoing strategic initiatives such as implementing a dual-layer DNS architecture with Cloudflare in front of AWS WAF and CloudFront, enhancing Moodle auto-scaling capabilities, evaluating database read/write separation strategies, and supporting the university’s ongoing migration of remaining on-premises workloads to AWS.

AWS Services used as part of the solution

The primary compute platform for the Student Information System and Moodle is Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), where Commencis manages cluster lifecycle operations including version upgrades across development, test, UAT, and production environments, worker node scaling, pod health monitoring, ingress controller configuration with WebSocket support, and network routing between EKS and on-premises systems. The main university website runs on Amazon EC2 with auto-scaling groups configured for horizontal scaling during traffic spikes, with instance types optimized through Reserved Instance analysis.

The database layer consists of Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL serving as the primary database for the Student Information System, running on high-performance Reserved Instances with automated backups and point-in-time recovery; Amazon RDS for MariaDB supporting the Moodle platform in Multi-AZ deployments for automatic failover; and additional Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instances for ancillary services. Amazon ElastiCache for Redis provides session management and application caching in both provisioned and Serverless configurations.

For content delivery and networking, Amazon CloudFront distributes content globally with Origin Shield enabled to reduce origin load. Elastic Load Balancing distributes traffic across multiple Application Load Balancers, Classic Load Balancers, and Network Load Balancers. Amazon VPC and AWS Transit Gateway provide multi-VPC architecture with VPN connectivity to the on-premises campus network. Amazon Route 53 manages DNS across multiple hosted zones, with a Cloudflare dual-layer integration currently being implemented.

The security layer includes AWS WAF deployed across CloudFront distributions and regional ALBs with OWASP Top 10 rule sets, AWS Managed Rules, Bot Control, and Anti-DDoS rules. Amazon GuardDuty provides continuous threat detection, AWS Security Hub and AWS Config run automated compliance checks and configuration tracking, and AWS Certificate Manager and AWS Key Management Service handle certificate lifecycle and encryption key management. Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service provides an additional commercial WAF layer for defense-in-depth.
For monitoring and observability, Amazon CloudWatch is configured with custom dashboards, standard and high-resolution alarms, and comprehensive log ingestion across standard and vended log classes. Amazon Kinesis and Kinesis Data Firehose power real-time data streaming pipelines. AWS CloudTrail provides API activity logging across all regions. Commencis also integrated Grafana with AWS data sources for enhanced visualization in the production environment.

Additional supporting services include Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) for student notifications, Amazon Athena for bounce-mail analysis, Amazon S3 with lifecycle policies for object storage and archival, Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) for shared application storage, AWS Backup for automated backup management, and Amazon ECR as the container registry supporting the CI/CD pipeline.

Third-party applications or solutions used

The solution incorporates several third-party technologies alongside AWS services. The Student Information System and Moodle e-learning platform are the primary application workloads, with Moodle being an open-source learning management system widely used in higher education. Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service provides an additional web application firewall layer protecting specific application endpoints. Grafana is integrated with AWS data sources for enhanced log and metric visualization. Cloudflare is being implemented as a dual-layer DNS and security solution in front of AWS CloudFront and WAF. The university’s hybrid connectivity relies on VPN integration with on-premises VMware infrastructure and campus network systems, maintaining continuity with existing LDAP directory services and internal applications during the ongoing cloud migration.

Commencis Support Services

Pre-Implementation Support

Before establishing the managed services engagement, Commencis conducted an assessment of Koç University’s existing AWS environment and operational requirements. This included reviewing the architecture of the Student Information System, Moodle platform, and supporting infrastructure; identifying gaps in monitoring, security, and operational processes; evaluating Reserved Instance coverage and cost optimization opportunities; and defining the scope of managed services required to support 24/7 operations.

Post-Implementation Managed Services

Commencis provides ongoing 24/7 managed services across the university’s entire AWS environment. Operational support includes continuous infrastructure monitoring and alerting, incident management with defined severity levels and SLAs, and proactive issue resolution. Commencis has managed a significant volume of support tickets to date, covering the full severity spectrum from critical production incidents such as database connection failures causing website outages, EKS cluster access problems, and security vulnerability remediation, through to planned project tasks including EKS cluster upgrades, database migrations, WAF rule additions, and Reserved Instance procurement.
Kubernetes management includes full EKS cluster lifecycle operations: version upgrades across all environments, node scaling, pod health checks, ingress configuration, WebSocket support, EKS-to-on-premises routing, and production resource scaling during enrollment and examination periods. Database administration covers Aurora PostgreSQL configuration and performance tuning, RDS MariaDB Multi-AZ management, read-replica troubleshooting, backup and restore operations, database migrations, and end-of-life version upgrade planning.
Security operations include continuous AWS WAF rule management and tuning, GuardDuty threat monitoring and response, Security Hub compliance checks, AWS Config rule evaluations, MFA enforcement, certificate lifecycle management, and encryption key management. During critical academic periods such as enrollment, WAF controls are intensified to protect the Student Information System from web-based attacks. Cost optimization activities include Reserved Instance and Savings Plans analysis, on-demand vs. reserved usage reporting, resource right-sizing, and annual budget forecasting to support the university’s financial planning cycles.

Commencis also provides strategic advisory services, driving proactive improvements to the university’s cloud environment. Current strategic initiatives include implementing the Cloudflare dual-layer DNS architecture, advancing Moodle auto-scaling capabilities, planning the transition from Reserved Instances to Savings Plans, executing Aurora PostgreSQL end-of-life version upgrades, supporting the full cloud migration from remaining on-premises infrastructure, and evaluating database read/write separation strategies for performance optimization.

Architectural Diagram

Figure 1 illustrates the managed services architecture that Commencis operates for Koç University. The diagram shows containerized academic workloads running on Amazon EKS, auto-scaling EC2 instances for the university website, Aurora PostgreSQL and RDS MariaDB database clusters, CloudFront content delivery with Origin Shield, multi-layered WAF protection, Transit Gateway connectivity to on-premises systems, and the monitoring and observability stack powered by Amazon CloudWatch and Grafana.

Commencis’s managed services engagement has enabled Koç University to maintain high availability for its most critical academic systems, including the Student Information System, Moodle e-learning platform, and the main university website, during peak academic periods such as enrollment windows, examination weeks, and semester openings. Across these high-demand periods, the environment maintained 99.6% availability/uptime, ensuring continuity for thousands of students and faculty. The auto-scaling architecture managed by Commencis absorbed sudden demand increases without the performance degradation previously associated with static capacity planning.

From a security and operations perspective, Commencis strengthened the university’s cloud posture through continuous AWS WAF rule tuning, Security Hub checks, and proactive remediation workflows. The managed services model also improved operational responsiveness, reducing incident response time, and supporting 91 requests under defined SLA targets.

The engagement also delivered measurable financial and operational efficiencies through Reserved Instance and Savings Plans strategies, rightsizing recommendations, and proactive governance. These efforts contributed to 65% cost optimization/cost avoidance, while allowing Koç University’s internal IT team to focus on modernization initiatives and academic innovation rather than day-to-day operational support.