Eduqat Builds Highly Scalable AI-Powered Online Learning Platform on AWS

Eduqat was established in 2023 to address the growing demand for online, easy-to-use learning platforms in Indonesia. Before 2023, the company operated under a different name as an online learning marketplace that connected learners with offline vocational classes, workshops, and webinars. The company also used an open-source web content management system (CMS) for its infrastructure. This system, while adequate for simple directory-related tasks, soon experienced issues related to scalability, resilience, and data security.

For instance, during the pandemic, the company experienced a 5,000 percent surge in demand for its existing online learning platform, which its servers were unable to adequately handle. Moreover, there were data security-related concerns, since the company handled sensitive personal information from learners and educators alike.

These concerns became especially critical after joining the Prakerja program in 2020, which required a system capable of reliably and securely supporting up to 100,000 learners per month. Since the company’s existing online learning platform did not meet said requirements, a new solution had to be devised.

Eduqat, in its current form, is a secure, customizable, and user-friendly online learning platform that allows educators to create, manage, and sell their online courses. Eduqat has also integrated AI technologies to help educators build landing pages, plan curriculums, and create quizzes. The goal of Eduqat is to empower educators and provide learners with a seamless online learning experience.

In 2023, Eduqat worked with AWS to migrate and build from an external LMS to a cloud infrastructure, significantly enhancing scalability, reliability, and data security. Using AWS, the company could now manage the intensive computing demands of AI/Machine Learning (ML) projects. As a result, educators on Eduqat could quickly create custom white-label websites and generate course content within 15 minutes. Moreover, they could grade assessments and provide tailored feedback promptly within two minutes.

The company implemented Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Auto Scaling, an automated cloud compute scaling service, for dynamic scaling. This delivered consistent uptime and seamless handling when traffic volumes increased. Eduqat also used Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service, to automatically deploy, manage, and scale its online services based on user volumes, without unnecessary resource allocation. With both services, the company aims to serve up to 300,000 users, maintain 100 percent uptime, and create reliable and positive learning experiences throughout the beta phase.

Utilizing the combination of Amazon DynamoDB, a serverless, fully managed database, and Amazon Relational Database Service for PostgreSQL (Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL), a fully managed database service, Eduqat could scale its database performance by several hundredfolds. The company also relied on AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service, to execute code and automate response requests as needed. With fully managed services in place, Eduqat no longer had to provision for or manage infrastructure, freeing the IT team to focus on innovation and growth.

For security, Eduqat activated AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), an identity and access management service, to oversee user and service access across all AWS services. This ensured only authorized access to critical resources, safeguarding against unauthorized entry and data breaches.

The company also deployed Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance, to operate and scale more than 500 terabytes worth of educational content in the cloud. With this service, Eduqat could now adjust its database resources as needed. During the beta phase, users had uninterrupted access to the full suite of learning materials 24/7.

Finally, with Amazon CloudFront, a low-latency content delivery network service, learners can view or download educational content significantly faster compared to the previous open-source CMS.