SaaS-based End-to-End eBook Solution helped the Customer to Serve Over 100K Users

The customer is a leading digital content solutions provider, with their end-users including global corporates, educational publishers, and institutions. The customer’s offerings allow their end-users to serve students of all ages and backgrounds by providing effective, compelling and engaging digital content across traditional & modern mobile platforms, formats, and devices.

One of their product, an end-to-end eBook solution, provided a great way to digitize books, making them interactive. The books were then distributed and delivered efficiently to the readers. This enabled the creation of interactive content from books by enriching them with contextual-rich media, including audio, video, documents, HTML activities, images, and on-page assessments.

The Challenge

The end-to-end eBook solution was available only to large publishers across the world, due to the traditional licensing model. However, the customer wanted to tap a large base of small and mid-sized publishers as well as educational institutes. This objective of the customer was constrained by the licensing model. Hence, they wanted to make their eBook solution available as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

Key Requirements of the Customer

Cloud Migration– The customer wanted to combine its platforms, integrate services, and deliver solutions to their users faster. However, limitations existed with the legacy system. To resolve this, the customer wanted to migrate from the incumbent infrastructure to AWS Cloud.

Consulting– In the process, the customer also wanted to re-architect their application to transform it into SaaS, which would enable them to make it easily available to their customers.

AWS Skilled Team– Owing to the requirement for faster time-to-market the customer wanted to engage with a team of skilled people with extensive experience of working on migration and SaaSification with AWS cloud.

Scalability– The customer wanted their system to support 400k users with 10% concurrency. This required resource-intensive, multi-step batch processing.

The Solution

Blazeclan’s team of certified AWS solution architects and migration experts helped in the migration of customer’s end-to-end eBook solution from their incumbent infrastructure to AWS cloud. This involved SaaSification of their existing platform, enabling them to reach a wider customer base. A faster time-to-market was achieved by migrating the customer’s eBook solution to AWS Cloud and re-architecting the infrastructure. The approach comprised of the following steps.

• Re-Architect– Suggested application-level changes to ensure that the application works seamlessly with AWS cloud components.
• Loose Coupling– Achieved high scalability and fault tolerance by re-architecting the application and leveraging loose coupling through EC2 instances, Auto Scaling, ELB, multi-AZ RDS deployment, and Amazon S3.
• Session Management- Using Redis (an in-memory cache, provided by Amazon ElastiCache) high scalability was achieved across nodes.
• Auto Scale– Setup different Auto Scale Groups for different application components such as content upload, media processing, and content distribution to end-users. Developed scripts to ensure the invocation of underlying servers and other dependencies of the application components on Auto-Scaled Instances.
• Scalable NAS- Designed & deployed a highly scalable NAS using Amazon EBS volumes. This helped in catering to their shared storage needs for a central pool of educational content.
• Load & Performance Testing– Carried out automated stress and performance testing for a scale of 400k users. Suggested, prepared, and shared detailed testing statistics with appropriate projections of AWS usage based on their expected future growth. This approach ensured that the platform was tested thoroughly for the following aspects -expected level of peak traffic on the website, simulated user interactions to mimic activities by users such as Login, Exploring the Product etc., and testing to cover all API.

Application-level changes were made to help build an application that performs at scale.

Application Level Changes– Helped the customer in identifying the application and database-related changes to remove performance bottlenecks and achieve a highly scalable application, database, and infrastructure design.

Iterative Application Testing– In an iterative process, Blazeclan worked closely with the customer’s team to conduct multiple performances and load testing cycles. This ensured that incremental changes are tested thoroughly before making the application live.

Managed Services on AWS

Managed Services– Setting up and executing processes to ensure smooth releases of new features on the new AWS environment

Benefits Achieved by the Customer

• Increased sales numbers by reaching & serving small and mid-sized publishers and educational institutes.
• Timely & immediate on-boarding of large clients and serving over 100k users each.
• The New SaaS-based eBook solution helped the customer to serve a wider user base.
• The new system, running on AWS, gave the customer flexibility for innovation, room for growth, and helped achieve high scalability.
• The customer was able to seamlessly release feature updates and remove duplication of efforts, which were required with the incumbent infrastructure.

Tech Stack