CollegeDekho Matches 50,000 Students with the Right College with Help from AWS EdStart

In 2018, CollegeDekho selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help it improve scalability, reliability, and security. By May 2020, the company had migrated to AWS completely. The all-in approach helped the company scale on demand and run its solution in a more cost-effective manner.

 

CollegeDekho then built its Lead Management System—the tool its internal team uses to counsel students—using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to host the application and Elastic Load Balancing to balance the load into multiple instances. The company also relies on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store admission-related documentation for students and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to store data and communications. In addition, the company takes advantage of Amazon CloudFront to improve site response time and user experience.

For additional support and guidance, CollegeDekho enlisted the help of the AWS EdStart program. AWS EdStart helps entrepreneurs quickly build the next generation of online learning, analytics, and campus management solutions in the AWS Cloud. CollegeDekho used AWS EdStart office hours and industry connections to optimize its infrastructure and reduce costs. “We were excited to be a part of AWS EdStart even before we migrated to AWS,” says Arora. “We were experimenting with products and user journeys because we did not have the time to reinvent the wheel for technology and infrastructure. AWS EdStart helped us get a head start building our product with robust infrastructure that is highly scalable.”

Since its founding, CollegeDekho has worked with approximately two million students and matched more than 50,000 students with a college that aligns with their skills and interests.

 

Using AWS, the company was able to auto scale to support 300 percent year-over-year traffic growth, including its all-time highest traffic of 1.5 million website visits in a single day. In addition, CollegeDekho drove marketing automation on huge data sets through on-demand infrastructure. They have also supported 400 academic counselors simultaneously using a Learning Management System application to direct students toward the right colleges. “We were able to reduce our page crawl speed by over 30 percent after moving to AWS,” says Saurabh Jain, cofounder at CollegeDekho.

Meanwhile, leveraging multiple Availability Zones has led to a robust redundancy policy and has given company leaders confidence in the high availability of data and services. “Hosting on multiple Availability Zones helped us achieve almost 100 percent uptime over the last few months, even in extreme cases of data center failures. Our customers are now able to browse through our site more reliably and efficiently,” says Arora.

Security has also improved. “AWS provides a highly secure infrastructure that works on a default-deny firewall policy,” says Jain. “Hence, we are assured that data and apps are well protected.”

Finally, building on AWS is helping the company achieve its mission of providing free college admissions counseling to every student in the country to help them find the right college match. “One of the reasons we are able to counsel students for free is because AWS offers affordable services and a pay-as-you-go model,” says Arora. “We have maintained a catalog of over 36,000 colleges and are actively working on automating parts of the counseling process. This will help us achieve the growth and reach we imagined.”

Going forward, Arora says CollegeDekho will continue to use AWS EdStart for technical assistance and support, and the company is looking forward to leveraging additional AWS EdStart initiatives like architectural reviews, founder dinners, and investor connections to drive continued success.

Arora and team also plan to explore AWS services like AWS CodeCommit and AWS CodeDeploy to fully automate infrastructure scaling and development across the company’s product portfolio, and they hope to eventually extend CollegeDekho offerings into other countries. “In addition, we would like to learn about various AWS artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services and run our AI/ML models on a data lake in AWS,” says Arora. “That will help us improve our understanding of the customer and increase predictability.”