Case Study On - EXTRAMARKS Achieves 15% ROI By Using AWS Auto Scaling.
About the company
Extramarks aims to transform the conventional system of education by providing modern-day total learning digital solutions to students as well as teachers. With easy to understand engaging content empowered by advanced technology, Extramarks effectively creates a smart, personalized, and interactive learning environment in the classroom and home alike. With features like- Progress Tracker, Mentor Support, Study Scheduler, Group Work, and many more; this one-app-one-solution is currently used by over 9000 schools across India, Singapore, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, and South Africa.
The business need
‘Extramarks’ interactive sessions have been providing deep, immersive learning through Learn-Practice-Test (LPT) Pedagogy. In this technology-driven time, Extramarks is constantly promoting independent learning for its stakeholders (parents, teachers & students) while maintaining continuity from school to home and ensuring effective communication among the stakeholders.
However, over the years their application was running on standalone servers in the public domain to handle the incoming load. This made them dependent on the main server and possessed many security issues which undoubtedly made the application vulnerable to attacks and malware. They were looking to cater to three prime requirements:
· Looking for a solution that would automate their scaling.
· Secure its application from any kind of attacks and,
· Deploy their application at a faster pace.
The Solution
I have analyzed and written below the right solution and configuration that could support the seamless functioning of the application to overcome the challenges mentioned above.
- The servers should be migrated to private subnets to make the application secure.
- To tackle the vulnerabilities of the website, AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) should be implemented with Cloud Front.
- AWS Auto Scaling should be implemented to handle the load based on the incoming load on the servers.
- OWASP WAF rules such as Cross-Site Match Conditions, Size constraint conditions, SQL injection, IP Match Conditions, and String regex Match Conditions should be implemented to prevent any further vulnerabilities.
The Benefits
With the solution proposed above, Extramarks will be able to achieve the desired results and achieve scalability on their application. Here’s a lowdown of the benefits derived by them:
- Servers now being on the private subnet will no longer be publically accessible and unauthorized access will be restricted, making it the server secure.
- No need to perform manual scaling.
- With this implementation of AWS Auto scaling, Extramarks was able to achieve an ROI of up to 15% on AWS cost.
- AWS Auto scaling also saved approximately 10% of their cost.
- CloudFront by AWS helped them caching content dynamically and made them leverage edge location for faster delivery of content.
