Indischool was founded in 2000 as a voluntary online community for elementary school teachers. The community was officially registered as a nonprofit organization in 2010, and it now has around 140,000 members who constitute 75% of the entire elementary school teacher population in Korea. The management and finance of the community are entirely supported by donations and volunteers. All Indischool members are elementary school teachers, who use this community to share their teaching guidelines, slides, and class materials. After moving from IDC to AWS and applying Auto Scaling, Indischool reduced their overall costs.
Previously, Indischool used a monthly subscription-based hosting service from IDC for about 10 years. The community’s server often suffered failures and delays as a result of an aging server. Additionally, it could not flexibly accommodate the increasing traffic of its 140,000 members. Since the Indischool members are elementary school teachers, there's not much server traffic during school holidays, but the cost still remained the same. When the server traffic exceeded the capacity limit and they had to add more servers to provide stable services, it took a lot of time from server order to shipment.
“Indischool is managed by volunteers, and there are only three people who are in charge of technical support. When any problem occured with the server, we had to visit the data center to resolve the issue, but the teachers were unable to keep track of servers during classes. As such, we decided to adopt the AWS Cloud, which ensures 99.9% availability, scalability, and cost optimization,” said Jae Dong Kim, Team Lead of Technical Research of Indischool.
“In selecting a cloud provider, we first considered domestic providers, but chose AWS because of their global market leadership and recognition," said Jae Dong Kim.
Also, “For a month after deploying a similar server environment to the existing server, we experimented with various AWS services for performance optimization. It was a trial period to assess cost reduction and usability. After the trial period, we found that the monthly average cost was practically the same, considering the low traffic during the holiday seasons. Based on such findings, we decided to transition to AWS and disposed of all physical servers,” Jae Dong Kim explained.
Indischool is now using various services, such as Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Route 53, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon CloudTrail.
The infrastructure was built to be managed by a small IT team using the fully managed deployment service AWS Codedeploy. AWS CodeDeploy helped to build a simple development environment, allowing convenient development, test, and distribution. They are also using the CDN service Amazon CloudFront to enhance the download speed of web content and attachments. In the case of CloudFront, they were able to reduce the cost with the help of NDS, a partner company that provides initial deployment, billing, and maintenance services. The Snapshot of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) offers a storage backup feature that facilitates easy management of other servers without interfering with the operating server. By applying AWS Auto Scaling, they are able to reduce the cost by decreasing server capacity during holiday seasons with low usage, while increasing the capacity during semesters with high usage. Amazon RDS and Elastic Load Balancing help secure high availability, and Amazon Elasticsearch Service helps to perform search and log analysis.
“By transitioning to AWS, I no longer feel pressured like I was when using the IDC data center. There is no need to visit the data center in the event of error, as issues can be easily resolved with just a few clicks through an automated AWS service. It almost feels like there’s another administrator, since the server is managed smoothly without additional effort required from developers,” Jae Dong Kim added.
Previously, Indischool's optimization was limited when using physical servers. Now, AWS offers continuous optimization for fast reaction speed. Jae Dong Kim added that this achievement was possible thanks to AWS.
Indischool Architecture Diagram
As AWS provides continuous services and cost optimization, Indischool will fully utilize AWS resources to reduce cost.
For more information, please visit https://aws.amazon.com/ko/events/migration/overview/.