Lightweight Cloud-Based Solution for Digital Education and Assessment

Abstract

With a shift from the regular in-class education to e-learning-based education, there is a need to have the right platform to conduct assessments and courses in a more effective and user-friendly manner which includes robust monitoring, capability of doubt clearing, easy sharing of reference materials and more. There is a need for a highly customizable lab which supports all languages and is very lightweight. Our solution focuses on the creation of a robust, lightweight lab that provides a plug-and-play model for on-demand compilation capabilities. This virtual lab is hosted on the in-house blade servers and virtualized using metal-as-a-service (maas) along with juju controller. Kubernetes is used for on-demand compilation support as well as serves as the load balancer for the servers. The lab is specific to Computer Science-related courses and aims to impact the students present in the low bandwidth and rural areas. Moreover, the proposed methodology enhances the capabilities of the institutions to utilize their resources to the fullest with the help of virtualization through maas, juju and open-stack and orchestration through Kubernetes.