About the client

Ness has a long standing engagement with one of the world’s largest education companies, providing solutions which enable online teaching, learning, collaboration and rigorous assessment.

Around ten years ago, Ness worked with them on an automation initiative which succeeded in transforming an overly-manual assessment process; the new workflow automated the emailing/physical distribution of large video, image and document files for review and feedback. The process had been slow, costly and time-consuming. Ness then helped move the whole process to the Amazon cloud and then systematically redesigned and reimaged the workflows at the center of the product architecture.

The Challenge

The original application was hosted on-premise so the client had to manage and maintain a huge number of servers to take care of the peak load during the academic year at examination time. Given that the assessments are seasonal, this was not cost-effective; and adding servers to increase capacity was a long drawn out process (at the time), and could not be achieved with short notice.

With the change in the technology landscape over the last decade, the client wanted to move to the latest Cloud tech stack, and take advantage of the Cloud’s capabilities to help with seasonal scaling, reducing the related costs – and looking at emerging Cloud features as the product matured.

The Solution

As the client had an existing relationship with Amazon, the AWS Cloud was the clear and obvious choice for migration. The entire application was rewritten from the ground up to take advantage of various AWS Cloud services that improved performance significantly. This not only helped in bringing down the development time and maintenance costs, but also helped significantly with the scalability requirements.

AWS Services Used

AWS Lambda, Step Function, Auto Scaling and AWS Aurora were all used in the solution.