Migrated and re-architected an online education platform from dedicated hosts to AWS using the Well-Architected Framework: ASG, ELB, RDS Multi-AZ, CloudFront CDN, WAF, and Shield for DDoS protection.
Coach2Reach's online education platform, deployed on dedicated hosts in a traditional configuration, had grown substantially over time. Their operations and support functions were overloaded with availability, latency, and security incidents that caused service interruptions.
As the number of students and courses grew, the infrastructure was not flexible enough to scale to meet demand. The existing setup also did not support the content delivery network capabilities the learning platform needed to deliver multimedia content to students worldwide.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to working from home brought even more students to the platform, leading to abrupt service shutdowns. They lost a considerable number of students and revenue, and suddenly needed an accelerated solution to scale infrastructure and improve availability, latency, and CDN support.
Cloudism used several AWS services to address availability, scalability, and performance. AWS provides services and infrastructure to build reliable, fault-tolerant, and highly available systems, but no single service offers 100% availability. We followed the AWS Well-Architected Framework and eliminated single points of failure across the architecture.
For EC2 compute and databases:
To improve performance and reduce latency, Cloudism deployed a Content Delivery Network using S3, IAM, and CloudFront. S3 stores multimedia content; IAM provides necessary privileges; CloudFront serves the content from edge locations close to each requesting user, providing consistently fast delivery worldwide.
We hardened the infrastructure and application security through multiple AWS services. Network ACLs, Security Groups, and Subnets restrict traffic to authorized connections, following a zero-trust model. Production and development environments run in separate VPCs. CloudWatch and CloudTrail VPC flow logs deliver activity and event logs to the security monitoring program. AWS WAF filters HTTP/HTTPS requests, and AWS Shield (integrated with CloudFront) provides DDoS mitigation.
After Coach2Reach's online education platform moved to AWS, more than 200 students could concurrently watch multimedia content at any time. With built-in AWS scalability and resiliency, the solution scales up or down as needed.
Availability and uptime improved from 93.2% to 98.7%, and outages were reduced to just two in the following 90 days. Using CloudFront to deliver multimedia content improved performance and reduced page load times to less than 3 seconds. Security incidents and DDoS attempts were identified early enough to implement containment.
One of the greatest benefits of this migration was the recovery of Coach2Reach's competitive edge through improved student enrollment and retention. Student retention rate increased to 70%, and conversion rate increased to 12%.
We reached out to multiple vendors, including Cloudism, to migrate and re-architect our platform on AWS. 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 roadmap, and very affordable. Within a few months, our platform's availability and uptime had improved to 98%, and the number of outages was reduced substantially.
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