7 October 2019
About The Client
Extramarks aims to transform the conventional education system by providing modern-day total learning digital solutions to students and teachers. With easy-to-understand, engaging content empowered by advanced technology, Extramarks effectively creates a bright, personalized, and interactive learning environment in the classroom and at home. 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 provide 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 central server and possessed many security issues, undoubtedly making the application vulnerable to attacks and malware. The client was looking to cater to three prime requirements:
- 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
The Cloud Consultants at Rapyder designed the right solution and configuration that could support the seamless functioning of the application to overcome the challenges mentioned above. The consultants at Rapyder proposed the following solutions to achieve the desired results:
- The servers were migrated to private subnets to make the application secure.
- AWS WAF was implemented with CloudFront to tackle the vulnerabilities of the website.
- AWS Auto Scaling was 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 were implemented to prevent further vulnerabilities.
- For new deployments to the server running in Auto Scaling groups, a script was written that the client would deploy the application on one static server and then run the custom script by Rapyder.
- The script was designed to take the AMI of the server and deploy it on Auto Scaling Group, ensuring that the new application was running successfully.
The Benefits
With Rapyder’s consultation and the right solution, Extramarks achieved the desired results and scalability on their application. Here’s a lowdown of the benefits derived by them:
- Servers now on private subnets were no longer publicly accessible and restricted any unauthorized access, making the server secure.
- The client no longer needed to perform Manual Scaling.
- With the implementation of AWS Auto Scaling, Extramarks achieved an ROI of up to 15% on AWS cost.
- Our scheduled scaling at peak times made them witness further savings of 10%.
- CloudFront by AWS helped the client cache the content dynamically and made them leverage edge location for faster content delivery.