AWS: A Support System for Startups
Almost every big tech companies and startups are using ‘Amazon AWS’
In the journey as the ARTH Learner in the program “ARTH -2020” under the guidance of ‘The World Record Holder Mr. Vimal Daga Sir’, I got to explore more and here I’m sharing some learnings.
You may have come across the term ‘AWS’ too frequently in your life. But ever ponder that, ‘What is AWS?’ I’ll try to outline it all here, including an Intro to AWS, AWS benefits, AWS history, some basic terminologies, a breakdown of AWS services and some prominent stories of AWS customers.
Let’s get Started!
‘Cloud computing’ has become an integral part of businesses across all industries. AWS is the most popular and salient form in this field. It improves efficiency and provides relief for any number of business practices. Earlier, businesses were completely dependent on purchased servers and resources with limited functionality with higher prices.
The existence of AWS have solved many of such problems. Companies using AWS have servers available at any instant, and AWS provides various workloads, increased storage options, and enhanced security measures.
Introduction to Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, and other functionality to help your businesses to scale and grow.
Some of the Benefits of AWS
One of the advantages of AWS is that you get more than 175 cloud services and products on a ‘pay-as-you-go’ basis. This means that you pay only for the services you use. And, it works on a relative scale which means the less you use it, the less you’ve to pay.
Some other advantages of AWS relate to the applications associated with it. The applications are reliable as they are running on a reliable and safe infrastructure, greater scalability due to on-demand infrastructure, larger flexibility in terms of design options.
History Of AWS
The AWS platform was originally launched in 2002 with only a few services. In 2003, AWS was re-envisioned to make Amazon’s compute infrastructure standardized, automated and web service focused. This re-envisioning included the thought of selling access to virtual servers as a service platform.
The idea was met with fervour. Amazon launched its first AWS product in 2006. After few years later, in 2012, Amazon hosted a huge event focused on collecting customer input about AWS. The company still holds similar events, which allows customers to share feedback about AWS. In 2013, AWS started to offer a certification process in AWS services,
In 2015, Amazon announced that its AWS revenue had reached $7.8 billion. Between then and 2016, AWS launched measures that helped customers migrate their services to AWS. And, this is the reason Amazon’s revenue increased to $12.2 billion in 2016. Today, AWS is offering more than 175 services and products and this is because the one company that is leading the cloud market arena is Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Some of the Basic Terminologies
- Region — A region is a geographical area or physical location around the globe where the data center has been set up. Each region consists of 2 (or more) availability zones. In present, Amazon is serving 24 (or more) regions in 245 countries and territories.
- Availability Zone — It is the AWS data center in a region available for use by any AWS customer. Around 77 availability zones are set up by Amazon across the globe till now.
- Instance — It is a virtual server in a cloud computing environment. It is built, hosted and delivered using a cloud computing platform, and can be accessed remotely.
AWS Services
Since it came into existence, Amazon Web Services has become an essential cloud computing technology. And, there are enormous number of services and products offering by Amazon in AWS. Here are some of the essential AWS’s listed :
1. Amazon S3
Amazon S3 or simply ‘Amazon Simple Storage Service’ is used for internet back up, and it’s the modest storage option in the object-storage category. And, one can retrieve all the stored data from almost anywhere at any instant.
2. AWS Data Transfer Products
These are migration, data collection, and data transfer products that help in collecting data easily. They also provides us the way to monitor and analyze data in real-time.
3. Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
‘Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2’ provides a secure and resizable computing capacity based on your needs. These are just the virtual machines in the cloud on which you have the OS level control.
4. Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Services)
This is a tool used in terms of notification alert, that manages and delivers messages to a large number of subscribers through email or SMS. You can send alarms, service notifications, and other messages intended to call attention to important information.
5. Amazon Lambda
This service runs your code depending on specific events and manages the dependent resources. One can use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services, or create your own back-end services that operate at AWS scale, performance, and security. It saves a lot of money compared with services that charge hourly rates.
6. RDS (Relational Database Service)
Allows you to run relational databases like MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle or SQL Server. These databases are fully managed by AWS like installing antivirus and patches.
7. Amazon EBS (Elastic Book Store)
It is an easy to use, high performance block storage service which is designed for use with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for both throughput and transaction intensive workloads at any scale.
8. Route 53
This is a DNS service in the cloud that doesn’t require you to maintain a separate DNS account. It’s designed to provide businesses with a reliable and cost-effective method to route users to internet applications.
BYJU’S Using AWS
One of the biggest online education hub BYJU’S is using Amazon Web Services as to deliver cutting-edge and content to its 15 Million students.
With over 10 million downloads and a revenue of Rs. 1341 crore in the last year, BYJU’s Learning App has grown to become India’s leading K-12 education app which offers highly adaptive, engaging and effective learning programs for students and competitive exams like JEE, NEET, CAT, IAS, GRE and GMAT.
Most of us have heard about BYJU’s — The Learning App, but not many know that how the company is managing it’s working over such a huge network.
The Challenge
Online Learning Company Looks to Learn and Grow
The India-based online learning app BYJU’S was founded in the year 2015 by ‘Byju Raveendran’. It has become the most loved and preferred education app for students and has made a big impact in the market of online education system. The BYJU’S learning app makes use of original content, rich animations, interactive simulations and engaging video lessons from India’s best teachers. And, this is the reason why BYJU’S is used by more than 15 million students and has 900,000 paying subscribers.
This splendid way of education helps students to learn in an efficient way in this era of technology. They are focussed to make students to be able to learn on their own by using online precise resources which helps students as to grow their power of thinking. The BYJU’S approach combines world-class teachers, proven pedagogical methods, innovative technology, and data science to deliver personalized learning, feedback, and assessment for students. But, this will require an enormous power of resources and storage.
As there was a rapid rate of growth of users of it’s mobile app, BYJU’S needed to find a more scalable and cost-effective solution than its ‘Heroku cloud platform’. Along with this, there was a need to enhance the analytical capabilities of the platform by getting feedbacks from students as to improve their contents. At this moment, BYJU’S decided to shift to AWS as they wanted to expand their scalability and reach.
Why Amazon Web Services (AWS) only ?
BYJU’S made a clear decision to shift to AWS to host their website and analyze their app and user data.
BYJU’S runs its website and mobile app on Amazon EC2(Elastic Compute Cloud) instances. For it’s primary database service, they are using Amazon RDS(Relational Database Service) and for storing the contents related to education, the company is using Amazon S3(Simple Storage Service) buckets.
For data Analytics, as to maintain their level of content and services by analyzing the feedback they are receiving, the company is making use of Amazon Redshift, which makes it easy to add nodes to the data warehouse and enables them to maintain fast query performance as the data warehouse grows.
“Based on the results, we can more directly map learning content to individual students’ needs or preferences.” says Ramachandran.
Scaling to Support 15 Million Users
In AWS, BYJU’S has a reliable and scalable cloud environment for hosting its website and mobile learning apps, allowing the company to scale on demand(this is the major advantage of using AWS) as the business keeps growing. In an interview, Chief Technology Officer of BYJU’S said :
We now have more than 15 million students using the BYJU’S mobile app, and we could not support that number without being on AWS. As our user and subscriber base continues to expand, we are extremely confident in our ability to support and manage that growth.”
Prakash Ramachandran
Chief Technology Officer, BYJU’S
As BYJU’S is a platform which has a huge demand and there is always an increase in resources and storage requirement as to manage their needs. All there requirements for resources and storage are fulfilled by Amazon Web Services. All what the company has to do essentially turn on a switch, and had more instances on AWS to support the demand whenever needed. It is very fast and simple.
AWS Benefits for BYJU’S
Gaining Better Insights into Student Behavior by analyzing data to improve their content and service.
By the means of AWS, BYJU’S is expanding its reach across the globe. They are gaining depth analysis about what student wants in their learnings, their preferences and thus enabling the company to develop their unique, effective and engaging learning methodology for students(which makes students to think out of the box) as to be the leading online education platform in market place.
It has a major factor of Scalability, to meet the demands of more than 15 million students of BYJU’S all over the world. And, it provides advantage of latest technologies to create some innovative products. The company also uses Amazon Redshift to send customized notifications to mobile app users based on courses they have completed.
BYJU’s is unceasingly expanding its functionality in a vision of providing the best learnings to every students. And, the company is always trying to innovate by making use of newer AWS services to develop solutions.
Recently, BYJU’s launched a product in India that takes advantage of the Amazon Alexa to deliver audio-based educational content on the Amazon Echo device. Using Alexa voice commands, students can find out additional information about certain topic or play educational videos or games within the BYJU’S app.
Conclusion
AWS is the best choice in cloud computing services for businesses across the world. It has a presence in almost over 190 countries and more than 100,000 active customers. These impressive numbers evidence the platform’s continual growth, with more and more businesses adopting AWS. It will help company and startups to grow more by using its services and products. In addition, AWS Features provides database and storage along with the security.
Now, that was a whole lot to cover but if you read it, Kudos!
Stay tuned for further readings on Cloud Computing, AWS and some more case study on AWS user’s, that will be more insightful same as this article and it will have an overview of these services and helps you to understand the power of cloud computing.
Stay Safe! Keep Learning!
#aws #awscloud #awscsa #arthbylw #vimaldaga #righteducation #educationredefine #rightmentor #worldrecordholder #ARTH #linuxworld #makingindiafutureready #righeudcation #cloudcomputing
