Transforming Education Industry with AWS
“Every kid coming out of school now thinks he can be the next Mark Zuckerberg, and with these new technologies like cloud computing, he actually has a shot.” — Marc Andreessen, Co-founder of Netscape, Board Member of Facebook
What is Cloud Computing ?
A simple definition of cloud computing involves delivering different types of services over the Internet. These services vary from software and analytics to secure and safe data storage and networking resources, everything can be delivered via the cloud. We are using various cloud based applications everyday that we don’t even realize !
The most common and widely adopted cloud computing services are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).
Few Companies offer such computing services, hence named as “Cloud Computing Providers/ Companies”. They charge its users for utilizing such services and the charges are based on their usage of services. AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud , Alibaba Cloud , IBM Cloud are the some of the cloud providers. Currently AWS is leading the Leaderboard with around 33% of the whole cloud market share.
AWS (Amazon Web Services)
AWS is a cloud computing platform provided by Amazon, that provides various cloud based services. AWS was launched in 2006 to handle the online retail operations of their commercial website Amazon.com. But later on it started to provide their service to other companies as well. Initially AWS was launched with only service offerings such as Amazon S3 cloud storage, SQS, and EC2(Compute as a Service). Today AWS offers more than 150 services to their clients. Amazon’s Pay As You GO model has helped keeping minimal operating costs.
Currently AWS offers services in about 190 countries, owning the global market cap of 33%, which is way more than any of it’s competitors . Even the government organizations, educational organizations, nonprofits as well as private organizations are using AWS for their needs.
Educational Organizations on AWS
Just a decade ago , education was limited to pen and paper but today not only the mode of education has become online ,there are various startups who are earning millions through online learning portal.
Here are some success stories in the Education domain where online mode of teaching has become a reality with the help of AWS.
BYJU’s
BYJU’S is India’s largest education company and the creator of India’s most popular learning app. BYJU’S has made a big impact on the online learning world since its launch in 2015. BYJU’s now have more than 15 million students and has 900,000 paying subscribers. BYJU’S chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the cloud platform for its website and mobile app.
“AWS is also very simple to configure. In just a few weeks, we moved the BYJU’S website, our apps, and a video pipeline to AWS.” -BYJU’s CTO Ramachandran
BYJU’S runs its website and mobile apps on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. The company uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL as its primary database service, and it stores all its content in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. BYJU’s even uses Amazon Redshift (a robust analytical tool that helps us collect usage data so we can more effectively personalize every student’s learning journey and provide customized feedback and in-depth analysis).
AWS has helped BYJU’s create market ready products to reach out to students globally . With the help of AWS Autoscaling BYJU’s do not have to worry about their varying load and can focus on purely on their expansion and their purpose to reach out to more and more students.
Coursera
Coursera offers massive open online courses (MOOC), specializations, degrees, professional and mastertrack courses from various reputed universities all around the globe.
AWS has helped Coursera reach to students all over the world with minimal latency using AWS EC2 Elasticity offering .
AWS has changed the image and reliability of these EdTech companies and is helping them grow to reach out students in every part of the world.