About the Client
Hindi Pathshala (HPS) is a rapidly growing educational technology company that provides online learning platforms worldwide. With a diverse client base spanning multiple countries, HPS serves millions of students and professionals. Their platform facilitates course delivery, assignment submission, online assessments, and collaborative learning environments.
Problem Statement
As HPS experienced exponential growth, with user base expanding by 50% year-over-year, they encountered several critical challenges:
1️⃣Scalability Issues: The existing infrastructure struggled to handle peak loads during exam periods and new semester starts, leading to system slowdowns and occasional outages.
2️⃣Security Concerns: With the increasing volume of sensitive student data, Hindi Pathshala needed to enhance their security measures to protect against evolving cyber threats and comply with stringent updates.
3️⃣Operational Inefficiencies: Managing multiple environments (development, staging, production) became increasingly complex and time-consuming, slowing down new feature deployments and updates.
4️⃣Cost Management: Infrastructure costs were rising disproportionately with user growth, impacting profitability and ability to offer competitive pricing.
5️⃣Compliance Challenges: As an international educational technology provider, HPS had to adhere to various data protection regulations (e.g., GDPR, FERPA) across different jurisdictions, which was becoming increasingly complex with their legacy systems.
Proposed Solution & Architecture
To address Hindi Pathshala's challenges, we designed a comprehensive AWS-based solution leveraging cloud best practices:
Multi-Account AWS Strategy:
● Implemented AWS Organizations and AWS Control Tower for improved governance and security.
● Separated production, development, and testing environments into distinct AWS accounts.
Scalable Infrastructure:
● Designed a multi-AZ VPC architecture with public, private, and data subnets.
● Implemented Auto Scaling Groups with Application Load Balancers for the application layer.
● Utilized Amazon RDS Multi-AZ for a resilient database layer.
● Integrated Amazon DynamoDB with DAX for high-performance, low-latency data access.
For Amazon DynamoDB Implementation we have observed following key benefits:
● Consistent read latency under 10ms for course content access.
● Ability to handle over multiple concurrent users during peak enrollment periods.
● 99.99% system uptime since launch.
● Flexibility to rapidly iterate on our data model as we receive user feedback.
●Integrated AWS Service Catalog with Control Tower to centrally manage and deploy Terraform configurations, ensuring secure, compliant, and consistent infrastructure provisioning across multiple accounts.
Enhanced Security Measures:
● Enforced least-privilege access using AWS IAM roles and policies.
● Implemented AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) for centralized access management.
● Deployed AWS GuardDuty and Security Hub for continuous security monitoring.
● Set up comprehensive logging and auditing using AWS CloudTrail.
● Setup and configure AWS WAF to an Application load balancer which enhances security, governance, and compliance by filtering malicious traffic, enforcing custom security rules, and protecting applications from common web exploits and vulnerabilities.
Compliance and Governance:
● Implemented data encryption at rest and in transit using AWS KMS and SSL/TLS.
● Utilized AWS Config for continuous compliance assessment.
● Leveraged AWS Control Tower guardrails to enforce policy compliance.
●AWS Control Tower Detective Guardrails Conformance Pack enhances security, governance, and compliance by continuously monitoring and enforcing AWS best practices, ensuring resources adhere to organizational policies across multiple accounts.
Operational Excellence:
● Adopted Infrastructure as Code using Terraform for consistent and version-controlled deployments.
● Implemented comprehensive monitoring and alerting with Amazon CloudWatch.
● Utilized AWS Systems Manager for efficient patch management and operational tasks.
Cost Optimization:
● Implemented AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets for detailed cost analysis and forecasting.
● Utilized a combination of Reserved Instances and Spot Instances to optimize EC2 costs.
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AWS Architecture for Hindi Pathshala
Outcomes of Project & Success Metrics
The implementation of the AWS-based solution resulted in significant improvements for Hindi Pathshala:
Enhanced Scalability:
● Successfully handled a 300% increase in concurrent users during peak periods without performance degradation.
● Reduced average page load times by 40% during high-traffic events.
Improved Security and Compliance:
● Using AWS Control Tower, we centralize security by providing automated governance and management guardrails, Service Control policies across multiple AWS accounts. It simplifies the enforcement of best practices, compliance, and security policies, ensuring a consistent security posture across customers cloud environments.
● Reduced time to address security findings by 60% through automated detection and response.
● AWS WAF attached to an ALB enhanced security by blocking malicious traffic, such as SQL injections or cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, in real-time. For example, AWS WAF automatically blocks IP addresses exhibiting suspicious behavior, ensuring compliance with security policies. This results in a more secure application environment by proactively mitigating threats and maintaining the integrity of sensitive data.
● AWS WAF with an ALB has improved performance and cost management. By filtering out unwanted or malicious traffic at the edge, AWS WAF reduced the load on backend servers, ensuring that only legitimate requests reach applications. This leads to more efficient resource utilization, potentially lowering infrastructure costs, and improving the user experience by reducing latency.
Operational Efficiency:
● Reduced time to deploy new environments from weeks to hours using Infrastructure as Code practices.
●Decreased mean time to resolution (MTTR) for incidents by 50% through improved monitoring and automation.
Cost Optimization:
● Achieved a 25% reduction in overall infrastructure costs despite increased capacity.
● Improved resource utilization by 35% through right-sizing and auto-scaling implementations.
Innovation and Market Competitiveness:
● Accelerated new feature rollout by 50%, improving Hindi Pathshalas's competitive position in the market.
● Increased customer satisfaction scores by 30% due to improved system reliability and performance.
Scalability for Business Growth:
●Successfully onboarded 10 new enterprise clients within 6 months of migration, a process that previously took over a year due to infrastructure limitations.
With the implementation of this AWS architecture, Hindi Pathshala has successfully transformed its Learning Management Solution into a scalable, secure, and high-performing platform. The combination of AWS Control Tower, DynamoDB, WAF, and RDS has enabled Hindi Pathshala to not only meet the current demands of its growing user base but also position itself to handle future growth with confidence.
For educational platforms looking to achieve similar scalability and security, adopting these AWS best practices and leveraging the services mentioned above can provide a solid foundation for success.
