Aakash Educational Services Limited

About Aakash Educational Services Limited

Aakash National Talent Hunt Exam (ANTHE) is a national level scholarship exam that helps students to take the first step towards their goal of becoming a doctor or an engineer by providing them with an opportunity to get up to 100% Scholarship and Cash Awards. ANTHE helps students to know their potential at All India Level and prepare under the expert guidance of Aakash BYJU’S India’s trusted name in coaching offering the best of both classroom & online learning experience, ANTHE 2021 will be conducted in both Online & Offline modes.

Industry

Education

Location

India

Challenge

Accelerate DevOps and enhance the scalability of its online exam platform to handle maximum traffic

Featured Services

DevOps Services, Containerization, Migration Services, High Availability

Benefits Summary

Accelerated DevOps

Enhanced scalability

“
MernPlus has been the trusted partner for my distributed team. Within our first engagement, they partnered with us on a critical project that enabled us to automate and deploy services from our next-generation online education platform regionally and globally. We could not have hit these targets if not for their well-architected and well-executed work. Exceptionally talented folks!”
CTO

Challenge: Accelerate DevOps and enhance scalability for its next-generation online examination platform to handle millions of users concurrently.

In the company’s traditional workflows, the Aakash education private limited was locked in application silos. The company was launching a new online education platform for talent hunt all across the country. Due to tight deadlines, they needed expert help to accelerate their DevOps initiatives. And, they wanted to ensure that AWS best practices were applied to scale the environment to millions of users daily.

Why AWS and MernPlus

The company’s head of product development was impressed with the work that MernPlus, had done for him previously. Based on MenrPlus’ AWS technical expertise in DevOps, containerization, and migration, he asked MernPlus to help build and deploy their AWS infrastructure to meet the company’s aggressive deadlines. MernPlus served as a trusted partner.

Aakash Education Private Limited is leveraging several Amazon Web Services:

Amazon CloudWatch – Monitors applications, responds to system-wide performance changes, optimizes resource utilization, and presents a unified view of operational health.
Amazon EFS Container Storage Interface (CSI) Driver – Provides a CSI interface that allows Amazon EKS clusters to manage Amazon EFS file systems’ lifecycle.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – A web service that delivers secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud.
Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) – Makes it easy to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications using Kubernetes on AWS.
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) – Provides the company with a simple, scalable, fully managed elastic network file system (NFS) for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources.
Amazon Elasticsearch Service – A fully managed service that makes it easy for the company to deploy, secure, and operate Elasticsearch at scale with zero downtime.
Amazon Route 53 – A highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service that provides a reliable and cost-effective way to route the company’s end users to internet applications.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) – A flexible way to store and retrieve data, providing the company with cost optimization, access control, and compliance.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) – Enables the company to provision a logically isolated section of AWS where they can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that they define.
AWS Application Load Balancer (AWS ALB) – To support content-based routing and applications that run in containers.
AWS Auto Scaling – Monitors the company’s applications and automatically adjusts capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance at the lowest possible cost.
AWS Certificate Manager – Provisions, manages, and deploys public and private Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates to secure network communications and establish the identity of websites over the internet as well as resources on private networks.
AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) – To control users’ access to AWS services.
AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) – A managed service that makes it easy for the company to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt its data.
AWS Secrets Manager – Enables the company to protect secrets needed to access its applications, services, and IT resources.
AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store – Provides the company with secure, hierarchical storage for configuration data management and secrets management.
AWS Transit Gateway – A service that enables the company to connect its Amazon VPCs and on-premises networks to a single gateway.

MernPlus Solution Architecture for Aakash's Anthe Online Talent Hunt Exam

MenrPlus helped Aakash Education Private Limited automate and deploy its next-generation online examination platform regionally and globally. The project’s scope was a high availability (HA), multi-tenant platform on AWS that enables users (Students) to take online exams without any latency.

The company collaborated with MernPlus to implement AWS best practices to accelerate DevOps and enhance scalability. MernPlus applied its expertise in DevOps, containerization, and migration.

MernPlus delivered rich DevOps capabilities, including a CI/CD pipeline, infrastructure automation, and infrastructure as code (IaC) as part of building a well-architected new online examination platform.

Infrastructure automation to accelerate DevOps includes:

Terraform core infrastructure buildout and a CI/CD pipeline to automate deployment leveraging Amazon EKS, Jenkins, Apache Airflow, and Kubeflow.
Amazon CloudWatch monitoring to automatically react to changes in AWS resources.
AWS Auto Scaling to monitor applications and automatically adjust capacity.

For networking, MernPlus implemented:

A multi-tenant network.
VPC peering connection between the engineering and data science Amazon VPCs.
Istio Kubernetes service mesh.
Network encryption of data at rest and data in transit.

MenrPlus created three Amazon VPCs within the company’s AWS account — a management VPC, a data engineering VPC, and a data science VPC.

The management VPC contains the bastion host, a traffic and security gateway.
The data engineering and data science VPCs have a public subnet and a database subnet in two Availability Zones to eliminate a single point of failure.
- In one of the private subnets, Kubernetes Metrics Server connects to AWS Auto Scaling, and Amazon EFS Container Storage Interface (CSI) Driver connects to the company’s file system.
- In the other private subnet are Jenkins Deployment, Jenkins Service, and AWS ALB Ingress Controller, which connect via AWS ALB Ingress (in one of the public subnets) to the Jenkins Domain in the Amazon Cloud. The Jenkins Domain and an External DNS Controller (in the private subnet) connect to Amazon Route 53.
- AWS Transit Gateway (which connects to the Amazon VPCs and the company’s on-premises networks) and an AWS Certificate Manager (which connects to AWS ALB Ingress in the public subnet).
- Amazon EFS and Amazon RDS are set up in the private subnets across multiple Availability Zones.
- Amazon EKS runs the Kubernetes management infrastructure across multiple AWS Availability Zones to eliminate a single point of failure.
In the data engineering VPC, MenrPlus implemented containerization, monitoring, and routing to:
- Store, manage, and deploy Docker container images (Amazon ECR).
- Deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications using Kubernetes (Amazon EKS running Python, GraphQL to build and query APIs, an S3 bucket for data ingestion, and Apache AirFlow to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor workflows).
- Monitor performance (Amazon CloudWatch).
- Route end users to internet applications (Amazon Route 53).
In the data science VPC, MenrPlus implemented AWS IAM for enhanced security.

High-level architecture diagram of the Management VPC and the Data Engineering VPC:

The Benefits

Teaming with MenrPlus on this project, Aakash Education Services Limited achieved these benefits:

Accelerated DevOps

MernPlus built and deployed the new architecture using automation to accelerate DevOps so that Aakash Education Services Limited will benefit from a shorter development cycle and increased release velocity – enabling faster innovation.

Accelerated DevOps

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