Cloud transformation to regain a competitive edge

Coach2Reach.com

Industry: Education, Training
Challenge: As Coach2Reach's number of students and courses grows, the infrastructure is not flexible enough to scale to meet the demand. In addition, the current infrastructure does not support the content delivery network capabilities the learning platform requires to deliver multi-media content to students around the world.
Services & Tech: Amazon VPC, Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, EC2 Auto Scaling Group (ASG), Amazon CloudFront, AWS Web Application Firewall(WAF) and AWS Shield

The Challenge

Coach2Reach’s online education platform, deployed on dedicated hosts in a traditional platform, has grown substantially over time. Their operation and support functions are overloaded with availability, latency, and security-related incidents that cause service interruptions. As their number of students and courses grows, the infrastructure is not flexible enough to scale to meet the demand. In addition, the current infrastructure does not support the content delivery network capabilities the learning platform requires to deliver multi-media content to students around the world.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the flexibility of working from home brought more students to the online platform which led to the abrupt and complete shutdown of their platform. They lost a considerable amount of students and revenue. They suddenly needed an accelerated response solution to enable scaling their infrastructure to support better scalability, availability, latency, and CDN support.

In nutshell, here are the core technical and operational challenges of the Coach2Reach:

Difficult to scale infrastructure components when needed
Poor latency due to lack of better content delivery services
Service interruptions due to server crashes
Poor security and DDoS protection within the platform

The Solution

Cloudism used several AWS services to implement the solution addressing availability, scalability, and performance functions.

Fault-Tolerance and High Availability:

Although AWS cloud provides services and infrastructure to build reliable, fault-tolerant, and highly available systems, there is no single service that provides 100% availability or fault-tolerance. Due to these constraints, we followed the AWS well-architected framework and eliminated the single point of failures using the following AWS services.

For EC2 instances or servers:

Implemented Auto Scaling Group (ASG) to helps application respond to dynamic traffic patterns based on a set of performance metrics.
Utilized Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) to balances traffic across multiple instances and multiple Availability Zones. Ensures that only healthy Amazon EC2 instances receive traffic.
Used dynamic DNS and Elastic IPs to ensure components of an application’s infrastructure always have the right context

For Databases:

Migrated MySQL standalone database to AWS Relational Database Services(RDS)
Enabled automated backups of RDS database to support point-in-time recovery of database instances
Configured Multi-AZ deployment to have a synchronous standby replicas in a different Availability Zone

Performance and Latency:

To improve the performance and latency, Cloudism has deployed a Content Delivery Network by combining three AWS services: S3, IAM, and CloudFront. AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) got introduced to store multimedia content, IAM (Identity Access Management) for the necessary privileges to access S3 buckets, and CloudFront CDN using the S3 buckets as the source data. This approach improved performance and latency as it provides consistently fast content delivery even in different locations due to the CDN edge servers that are close to the requesting user.

Security and DDoS Protection:

We have improved the infrastructure and application security by implementing multiple AWS services. Through the use of Network Access Control Lists (NACLs), Security Groups, and Subnets, traffic is restricted to only authorized connections and services by using a zero-trust model. We introduced separate Virtual Private Clouds (VPC) for production and development environments. Using CloudWatch and CloudTrail VPC flow logs, activity and event logs are captured and delivered to the security monitoring program to provide visibility into network communications. In addition, we implemented AWS WAF filters for both HTTP and HTTPS requests and AWS Shield integrated with CloudFront for DDoS mitigation.

The Outcome

After the Coach2Reach’s online education platform was moved to AWS cloud using Cloudism’s approach and solution, concurrently more than 200 students can use the platform to watch multi-media content at any given time. With built-in AWS scalability and resiliency, the solution can very quickly scale up or down as needed. Availability and uptime have improved from 93.2% to 98.7%, and the number of outages was reduced to two in the last 90 days.

Using CloudFront to deliver multimedia content has improved performance and user experience. It has also reduced the page load time to less than 3 seconds with multi-media content. Security incidents and DDoS attacks were identified early enough to implement containment actions.

One of the greatest benefits of this migration was the recovery of Coach2Reach’s competitive edge by improving its student enrollment and retention. Coach2Reach’s student retention rate has been increased to 70% and conversion has been increased to 12%.

“We reached out multiple vendors including Cloudism to migrate and rearchitect our platform in AWS cloud. My experience with Cloudism’s services has been second to none. Their cloud service portfolio is feature rich, supported by a well thought-out strategic road map and very affordable. Within few months, our platform’s availability and up time has improved to 98%, and number of outages are reduced substantially.”

Sivakumar Padmanaban
COO at Coach2Reach.com