Summary

Chapter Apps Inc assesses client needs and delivers customized B2B e-learning services. It provides corporate training and assessment tests for employees and customers to increase engagements. The product architecture by Goognu enabled Chapter Vitamins to handle up to 10,000 concurrent user assessments. With the help of AWS Auto Scaling, they now enjoy flexibility and scalability in a server-less environment. This has allowed them to scale in and scale out based on user traffic for optimum utilization of resources. 

The Client

Incubated in 2015, Chapter Apps Inc is a cloud-based learning management system that focuses on engaging users. Chapter Vitamins is a mobile experiential learning platform that provides enterprise micro-learning and assessments for businesses. Every business is unique and has individual administrator requirements. The company assesses these business needs and performs tests to gain insights on individual user performances and provides solutions to boost end-user performance using technology and interactive content.

The Goal

Chapter Vitamins provided customized learning apps for businesses. These apps were versatile and offered unlimited modifications together with several in-built features. But Chapter Vitamins faced a scalability challenge when conducting assessment tests. They needed a product that could automatically scale the infrastructure at the time of assessments.

The challenge was to design, develop, test, and deploy a cloud system that provided flexibility and scalability to accommodate up to 10,000 user assessments at the same time. This deployment had to be smooth and seamless across multiple devices like mobiles, laptops, tablets, etc. Further, Chapter Vitamins wanted to implement an alert and monitoring system to drive engagements.

The platform needed to support 10,000 GB data transfer to company employees in the form of videos, podcasts, PDFs, flashcards, quizzes, and interactive chat-bots. And the infrastructure should allow for data growth in reporting over time.

Highlights

• Designed a cloud infrastructure to support 10,000 concurrent users for test assessments.
• Single-click deployment using Jenkins to facilitate continuous integration and delivery.
• Enabled automation and proactive alerts to monitor implementation and user performance.
• Achieved scalability for optimized resource utilization with an auto-scaling feature that allows scaling in and scaling out of the infrastructure based on users taking the tests.
• Successfully handled 10,000 GB data transfer to company employees in different forms such as help videos and podcasts, PDFs, flashcards and quizzes, chat-bots, and more.

Key Features

• Successful single-click deployment of automated cloud infrastructure using Jenkins for continuous integration of codes and reduced downstream errors.
• Achieved flexibility and scalability of the infrastructure to allow Chapter Vitamins to scale up and scale down based on the number of users taking the assessment test.
• Minimized application latency for a consistent user experience through the development, deployment, and transition to AWS.
• Enabled proactive alerting and monitoring system with call and SMS based alerts for better engagement.
• Handled the transfer of 10,000 GB data to companies and employees.
• Optimized costs by providing a commercial-grade cloud database at one-tenth of the cost. This ensures the best performance during high workloads while supporting global presence.
• Increased assessment testing capabilities to 10,000 concurrent users. Previously, the infrastructure could support 5,000 to 15,000 user assessments.
• Provided real-time access to help videos, podcasts, PDFs, and other interactive content over the cloud. This helps the user to improve their performance and thus achieve client goals.
• Designed a robust app with security features and authentication to maintain data integrity.

Technical Excellence

• Overcame the scalability challenge by implementing AWS Auto Scaling and RDS Aurora DB. This automatically adjusts for scale. For example; more the users, more the number of students taking assessment tests. This means more data transfer; and the app will automatically scale up or down as needed.
• Smooth transition and integration from the existing platform to the AWS cloud infrastructure.
• Executed 10,000 GB data transfer to companies and employees in the form of help videos, podcasts, PDFs, and other interactive content.
• Used AWS EC2, RDS, and ElastiCache to ensure the Chapter Vitamin Apps can sustain 10,000 concurrent users.
• Strived to deliver low latency in apps by using Jenkins for DevOps. Jenkins follows a continuous integration and continuous deployment model to dramatically reduce the downstream errors.
• Implement security and user authentication checks to ensure data integrity.

Use of AWS Services

• Used Jenkins to deploy the Chapter Vitamins App. This allows them to resize the AWS EC2 instances based on the changes in the load. Goognu’s DevOp team was able to configure Jenkins on a virtual server to meet the needs of Chapter Vitamins App and deploy the app with a single click.
• Used AWS EC2, Amazon RDS, and ElastiCache to automatically deliver a scalable cloud computing capacity.
• Used Amazon S3 to support data growth. This ensures data availability, security, storage, and retrieval for optimized performance.