CASE STUDY
Smrt English
Delivering a secure and highly available deployment while improving performance and scalability
Who is Smrt English
A digital English learning platform Smrt English provides very popular English courses online through their web platform. The platform is used by almost 100,000 students from close to 100 institutions around the world and the site is very popular with students in Mexico and Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia.
Industry
Education, PaaS
Challenge
Implementing a robust, autoscaling environment for handling high load on application
Services & Tech
Cloud Infrastructure, Amazon VPC, Amazon RDS, Amazon EC2, Amazon ELB and AWS Auto Scaling
Implementing a fault-tolerant deployment
Smrt English has been hosting the site on Amazon EC2 for some time, but the deployment was not providing the high availability they needed. After few unexpected outages causing the web site to go down for prolonged time and the inherent risk in losing data due to the limited deployment architecture, they decided to invest in implementing a fault-tolerant deployment that would be architected to handle increased performance requirements to support the ongoing growth in popularity.
Goals
- Maintain high availability & performance
- Automated software configuration
Solution
- Robust, scalable solution addressing resiliency
- Auto-scaling on the application tier for handling load increases
Outcome
- Fully automated environment meets availability & performance requirements
- Transformation to
Agile cloud business
“Working with Onica has been a great pleasure and it’s totally changed the way we run our website. Now our site can handle any amount of traffic.”
Jeremy Clark
CIO
Results/Benefits
Having insights from monitoring tools helped us to fine tune the system and reduce the cost of the infrastructure while providing a much improved performance compared to the original deployment.
Onica also implemented a fully automated build system that connects their SVN repository and AWS Elastic Beanstalk and allows them to frequently release new versions of the code without requiring direct support. This has proven to be very beneficial as the organization has successfully made many code pushes to production, allowing them to run an agile process and constantly improve the service they provide to the students.
Why Us
Onica’s speciality in AWS helped develop the best possible solution for Smrt English. By combining Amazon VPC, Amazon RDS, Amazon EC2, ELB and AutoScaling we architected a new deployment that would meet the high availability and performance requirements. Adding monitoring tools for better visibility into the performance of the environment and the application and enable us to ensure the smooth operations that Smrt English required. Having this insight helped us to fine tune the system and reduce the cost of the infrastructure while providing a much improved performance compared to the original deployment.
One key requirement from Smrt English was the need for automated software configuration management. By using AWS CloudFormation and AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Onica fully automated the entire environment, from the underlying network to the auto-scaling configuration, and as a bonus, enabled Smrt English to deliver the system in any region of the world with a click of a button if they require to improve the experience in certain parts of the world. On top of automating the environment, Onica also implemented a fully automated build system that connects their SVN repository and AWS Elastic Beanstalk and allows them to frequently release new versions of the code without requiring direct support.
OUTCOMES
Auto-scaling implementation
Onica immediately recognized the potential in delivering a robust and scalable solution that would not only address the concerns around resiliency, but also provide future-proofing for handling load increases by implementing auto-scaling on the application tier. We also put a number of monitoring tools to get better visibility into the performance of the environment and the application and enable us to ensure the smooth operations that Smrt English required.
WHY US
Why Onica
Onica is one of the largest and fastest-growing Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Consulting Partners in the world, helping companies enable, operate, and innovate in the cloud. From migration strategy to operational excellence and immersive transformation, Onica is a full spectrum AWS integrator. Learn more at www.onica.com.
