By KTP Radhika
Classle Knowledge is a Chennai based start-up that offers a social learning platform and education empowerment for students in rural India. Founded in 2009, it blends social networking and e-learning, and transforms traditional classroom learning into collaborative online education. It also partners with more than 30 educational organizations, including the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, IIT Patna and the Indian government’s National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) to facilitate e-learning.
Today, the company has more than 2.5 lakh student members. Over 100 institutions have signed up for Classle’s cloud campuses.
What Classle needed was a very cost-effective and highly scalable infrastructure platform to start their business. The management understood that cloud based solutions would be the right answer to their problems. Explains Nathan: Cloud is vastly different from the traditional way of maintaining your own on-premise infrastructure. With Cloud, you do not have to worry about maintaining infrastructure, putting people and resources, spending time on all the undifferentiated heavy lifting that really does not contribute to the business. It also does not require capex at all, is fast to deploy and highly scalable.”
The company then evaluated their needs with various solutions available in the market. After a thorough study, they decided to choose the cloud platform of Amazon Web Services (AWS) for their business. Amazon’s robust technology infrastructure and its years of experience in handling different scenarios across business sizes prompted Classle to go with their solution.
The implementation
At first, Classle deployed Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances with MySQL. They used Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), couple of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes for storage. As their operations expanded, subsequently, the company modified their platform using Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (Amazon ELB), Amazon Route 53, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) with Amazon Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Auto Scaling. The implementation of AWS solution was easy with their simple approach to enabling and configuring services,recalls Nathan.
The company has established Amazon’s content delivery service, Amazon CloudFront, as an edge server for streaming files and delivering the learning platform痴 most requested video downloads. Amazon S3 with the RRS feature serves the dual function of providing Classle痴 content downloads and acting as an origin server for Amazon CloudFront. Classle notes that the origin and edge server relationship the company has created between Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront has allowed it to reduce its web page load time by 180% and has brought the time-to-market down to two days.
Seamless benefits
With the support from Amazon, Classle is now able to offer greater efficiency to its customers. The company has also made significant cost saving. Classle saves about 30-35% of its costs by using the AWS cloud,says Nathan. Amazon services are available round the clock. However, we can switch on the services when we need them and only have to pay by the hours that we actually use them. This allows us to focus on our core business,he adds. Moreover, RRS option within Amazon S3 enables them to further reduce costs by storing non-critical, reproducible data at lower levels of redundancy.
Classle also maintains seamless business continuity with the help of flexibility that the cloud offers. AWS ensures that servers are up all the time with negligible downtime, if any. The cloud solution also enables them to innovate and experiment a lot more than before, making their services more comprehensive, and accelerating the time to market and enabling them to reach more students with more innovative and relevant services.
And there is more. Classle deals with a lot of personal data. Protecting it and maintaining privacy was a concern for them. By choosing the AWS cloud services, Classle is now able to make their data HIPAA compliant (a US standard for protecting sensitive personal data) ensuring the highest degree of privacy. 鄭dopting AWS has given our company a competitive advantage, both at tactical as well as strategic levels. It is helping us to focus on the business and assume that the infrastructure will be available to match the velocity and growth. We are now effectively competing with some large and strong players in the e-learning space,avers Nathan.
Expansion plans
Recently, Classle expanded their focus into schools targeting grades 6-12 with unique innovations to take the distribution to hard-to-reach places and bringing quality education there. Our seamless scope to expand and grow in depth is already causing ripple effects,observes Nathan.
Classle has plans to grow rapidly and increase the volume of usage for AWS services. “We are working on multimedia apps and are aiming at a target of 2.5 million students in the next 18 months. We also expect the ripple effect to spread to the rest of the world with the sound foundation and robust architecture of AWS cloud platform,” Nathan visualizes.
Within the next few months, Classle will also launch academic analytics based employment services as well as domain learning services to continue its relationship with the students and help them in their journey toward life-long learning. For that, the company has already started doing prototypes using Amazon Elastic Map Reduce.