Educating via the Cloud

India has been rising up the global ladder and has wooed the world with its promising economy. There is raw talent everywhere in the country, waiting to be harnessed. However, students do not get a chance to use their talent nor get discovered as they are not provided with good quality education and opportunities.

Classle aims to solve these issues with its Internet-accessible platform. The cloud-based social learning platform allows students to connect with other students as well as experts and professionals from academic, research institutes, and industry. The goal of the company's platform is to assist students pursuing higher education, learn and develop skills in a manner unencumbered by socio-economic, location and resource barriers. Classle, a social enterprise, is currently focusing on rural regions of India where students struggle with resource limitations.

When Classle considered its big challenges that lay ahead, scalability was one big factor. "To continue down this line, I knew we had to think differently. We had to focus our efforts into a solution and not into infrastructure as the setup and operating costs would go up," revealed Vaidya Nathan, Founder & CEO, Classle Knowledge. They conducted a study and considered the pros and cons of all their options.

Classle decided that public cloud was their way forward. When they implemented cloud, it wasn't an afterthought. It was the first solution they implemented, which saved them a lot of effort. "We did consider alternatives like purchsing and creating a datacenter ourselves. We also considered a model where we could use a large business house's infrastructure and work as an intrapreneur, but it was too radical for them. Cloud seemed like the best solution," revealed Nathan.

WHY AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been the foundation of Classle's infrastructure since the company's inception. Nathan explains that AWS allowed the company to begin operations six months ahead of schedule and more economically than had been anticipated. Classle is also impressed with the growing list of additional services offered by AWS, which the company has embraced to help further its own expansion.

Nathan says, "The flexibility, reliability, and elasticity were the reasons for the initial decision to use AWS. Over the past two years, other services coming from AWS like Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch, Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon Route 53 confirm that the decision was the right one. As a startup, we have to worry about balancing scalability with cash preservation and we get the best of both worlds with AWS. We see AWS as a strategic fit for our long-term business strategy."

Classle uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), with the Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (Amazon ELB), Auto Scaling, and Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) features, to handle its application and analytics server needs. Amazon RDS acts as Classle's data warehouse and transactional database.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), with the Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) feature, serves the dual function of providing Classle's content downloads and acting as an origin server for Amazon CloudFront. The company has established Amazon's content delivery service Amazon CloudFront as an edge server for streaming files and delivering the learning platform's most requested video downloads.

Classle indicates that the origin and edge server relationship the company has created between Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront has allowed it to reduce its Webpage load times by 180% and reduce its total costs by 8% and in the case of video streaming it brought the time-to-market down to 2 days.

The company monitors its AWS infrastructure with Amazon CloudWatch and uses Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to delivery system load alerts to its developers. Additionally, Classle routes its users to its websites with Amazon's Domain Name System (DNS) service, Amazon Route 53.

BENEFITS

Based on its success in India, Classle plans to eventually expand its social learning platform to the worldwide market. In the more immediate future, the company is planning a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering of its platform, in addition to the website-based version. As Classle works toward these new goals, it will be looking to incorporate additional services from AWS, such as Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) and AWS CloudFormation, which assists developers in combining AWS resources within the company's infrastructure.

Nathan says, "Adopting AWS has given our company a competitive advantage, both at tactical as well as strategic levels. We are effectively competing with some large and strong players in the e-learning space. Adopting AWS has let us keep our focus on the business and assume that the infrastructure will be available to match the velocity and growth."

ADVICE TO IT DECISION MAKERS

Nathan agrees that there are many myths around cloud, but one has to take a chance with the new technollogy. "If it doesn't work, you can easily go back to the old ways without risking a big financial investment. Moreover, CIOs need to bring in ‘elasticity' into their vocabulary, it changes the financial dynamics," he concludes.