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Follow UsWhat directed your inclination for Cloud as a platform for your business? And then towards Amazon?
Classle Knowledge is an India based start-up since 2009 with focuses on Social Learning with a specific focus on education empowerment for college students, especially in rural India since these students are not adequately serviced and struggle with resource limitations. Startup funding is not easy in India and I was getting very impatient. One of the reasons was that my idea was perceived by others as a far stretch because almost no one has ever done anything for Rural India, especially as a scalable and sustainable business, and therefore no one believed in what I wanted to do. So, I put my own money to start Classle. With this background, you can appreciate that I need to find a very cost-effective and yet highly scalable infrastructure platform that can scale Classle’s services as the reach of students grow. Amazon Web Services (AWS) not only meets the requirement, it also does not require me to have any upfront commitment or contact anyone to use their services. In other words, there are no barriers in using AWS, it is easy to start and there is no lock-in. So, I felt very comfortable to experiment ideas and not worry about failed experiments since I can start and stop anytime and pay at a low cost for what I actually use by the hours.
How has the decision fared so far?
Classle’s infrastructure is built 100 per cent on AWS cloud platform right from the inception, and it is a straight strategic decision that I had made. We like the way AWS works with customers as they not only listen but are also able to innovate and execute quickly. By adopting AWS, it has allowed the company to begin operations six months ahead of schedule. It has helped me speed up my development work and enable me to roll out Classle’s innovative services very quickly. I have rolled out nine features initially for the learners compared to five features if I were to use an on-premise infrastructure. It has helped me accelerate more learning moments to rural students.
How is it shaping up on the application and control side?
As a startup, we have to worry about balancing scalability with cash preservation, and we get the best of both worlds with AWS. The flexibility, reliability, and elasticity were the reasons for the initial decision to use AWS. Classle uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), with the Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (Amazon ELB), Auto Scaling, and Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) features, to handle its application and analytics server needs. Amazon RDS acts as Classle’s data warehouse and transactional database. The company monitors its AWS infrastructure with Amazon CloudWatch and uses Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to delivery system load alerts to its developers. Additionally, Classle routes its users to its Websites with Amazon’s Domain Name System (DNS) service, Amazon Route 53.
How significant is security as a concern (any fears in light of recent Amazon outage and VMWare foundry’s blackout)?
Everyone seems to bother about security in the cloud but the real question is, what new security vulnerabilities am I getting exposed to while making the choice? I am sure you have heard of the sayings:Question: Where do you hide a stone? Answer: In a quarry. Or Question: Where do you hide a tree? Answer: In a forest. If I were to host my own data in my own premises and suppose somebody breaks, they know that they can exactly get the data they are looking for namely data kept by my company. If you are using AWS where they have hundreds of thousands of customers, where are you going to put your fingers on? Where are you going to steal it from? So that is my answer. Also the cost of break-in is traded off with the value of data. There are a series of robust services available to manage access through which the protection can be done. Having an on-premise infrastructure is not as secured as what you think and not the only secured option. I see more benefit of using AWS than an on-premise infrastructure. Our applications and data running on AWS cloud is in the safest place.
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You think that it does not make internal controls redundant?
Business and technology fundamentals are always valid regardless of the change in landscape. While AWS as a service provider takes care of lot of things and increase the reliability, there are certain availability scenarios which we need to consider and handle it ourselves. AWS may give tools and means to implement the scenarios with ease and efficiency; but coming up with the scenarios and the mitigation is our responsibility. The technology, service or a vendor is not a silver bullet.
What unique business (apart from the technology side) benefits has this platform allowed you to leverage? What exactly is the edge over competition here?
There is business sense in using AWS cloud because I am able to offer greater efficiency to my customers. Let me give you a simple ratio with the tagline being — buy two years and get one year free. That is the key, essentially I am stretching the investments as far as possible. For a startup or an innovator, a lot of innovations need time to germinate. Cash is the blood and we wouldn’t want to run out of it before the idea takes root. If you run out of cash very quickly, then you wouldn’t give the idea or venture a fair chance. So getting a full bonus year was terrific and in the space that I was in, almost nobody had touched that space (Rural India) before. Now, we’re able to innovate and experiment a lot more, make our services more comprehensive, and accelerate our time to market to reach more students with more innovative and relevant services.
What next?
We are growing rapidly and increasing the volume of usage for AWS services. Firstly, we are working on multimedia apps and are aiming at a target of 2.5 million students in 18 months. I am expecting the ripple effect to spread to the rest of the world. So if we think about the scale needed for this rapid growth, I will require the foundation and architecture to be sound to handle all the traffic in a highly scalable manner — this is where the robust global platform of AWS comes in. Secondly, in eight months’ time, we will be launching pure play social networking, which is a tool that helps Classle to continue the relationship with the student and help them in the journey towards life-long learning. I am looking forward to using Amazon Elastic MapReduce to serve this purpose in support our long term goal.