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February 01, 2022

Amesite scales e-learning, reduces costs on Azure, backed by Azure Database for PostgreSQL

Technical Story

Amesite Inc. is on a mission to improve the way that the world learns. Its sophisticated online learning ecosystems use AI to mass-customize e-learning and to deliver affordable software as a service (SaaS) and content creation services to businesses, universities, government, and nonprofit organizations that deliver online learning programs. Propelled by a successful IPO (NASDAQ: AMST), Amesite built coast-to-coast sales on the strength of strong user reviews and course retention rates that it delivered for its customers. To retain its competitive advantage, Team Amesite aims to keep setting the bar for higher user engagement and to dramatically speed delivery to its customers.

Amesite

In search of a new hosting platform, Amesite partnered with Microsoft in a strategic move to ally itself with an agile cloud provider that shares its views on data privacy, security, and cloud-first principles. In addition to migrating its application to Azure infrastructure in just two months, Amesite migrated its data to Azure Database for PostgreSQL, a fully managed service that helped the company to make a seamless move from AWS and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. Amesite can now onboard customers in 24 hours or less on an e-learning solution with the scale that it needs to grow—and at half the infrastructure cost.

“Partnering with Microsoft has been great for us. It’s shorthand for, ‘The company that cares most in the world about data security, data privacy, and great infrastructure is our partner.’”

Dr. Ann Marie Sastry, Founder and CEO, Amesite

The need for speed and great infrastructure security

The future of work is changing quickly, and Amesite sees an opportunity to help learners gain and retain the skills they need. The fast-paced company tailors its e-learning solutions in partnership with its customers, making sure that workers and students have access to the latest technology and the most up-to-date, highest-quality content possible. The company’s cloud-based platform was recognized with a 2020 BIG Innovation Award, the only crowdsourced industry awards program for businesses.

According to Dr. Ann Marie Sastry, Amesite Founder and CEO, "People who are serious about delivering online learning effectively understand that you must sincerely compete for people’s attention. Engagement precedes learning, not the other way around.” As Amesite sees it, educational technology should operate with the same ease, agility, and speed as the streaming audio and media services that people use every day.

To keep e-learning affordable yet scalable, the company uses powerful AI and best-in-class analytics to measure performance. Customers receive a custom-branded turnkey platform—what Amesite calls a Learning Community Environment™ system. It supports thousands of APIs, allowing organizations to incorporate existing systems and resources and to customize the platform to their needs.

“You should not have to trade your data for an education,” Sastry states. “Amesite was founded on the idea that we would not monetize learners’ data. We would keep the data secure, and that was—and remains—of paramount importance to us.”

That’s why partnering with the right cloud provider was so critical. Amesite’s business strategy required a cloud service that was consistent with company values and its commitment to data privacy and security. “We like transparent business transactions,” Sastry adds.

The business strategy also had several important technical goals—to make operations efficient, to speed launches, and to implement efficient infrastructure management with a deeper focus on DevSecOps. As Amesite saw it, the right cloud provider would support these strategic objectives while also offering support for greater degrees of configuration management, more automation, and low- and no-code solutions—everything needed to future-proof the platform and keep it affordable for customers.

‘Azure is a great fit for us’

The search led Amesite to Microsoft, and the team began testing Azure as the hosting platform for its e-learning solutions.

“We've always been committed to modular architectures, automation, and outstanding DevSecOps practices. We determined that Azure was a great fit for us,” Sastry reports. “Microsoft and Amesite share a commitment to these practices.”

Microsoft invited Amesite to join its FastTrack program, which helps customers accelerate cloud solution deployments. That assistance, paired with Microsoft’s position as a world leader in data security and privacy, sealed the deal.

Amesite Director of Engineering Infrastructure Jonathan Hunkapiller oversaw the move. “Working with the FastTrack team was easy, and they understood our objectives,” he says. “We were coming from an AWS implementation. That's why we were looking at Azure from various perspectives and comparing components, doing one-to-one mappings for the infrastructure and the technology.”

The goal was to make the most of Azure services and features to “up-version” the Amesite solution, as Hunkapiller puts it, and give customers a performance boost and new features. At the same time, Amesite wanted to move existing customers from the other cloud provider. The easiest way to do that was to build the platform directly in Azure using Azure Virtual Machines running Linux and Ubuntu terminal through Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS.

“We knew we wanted to get on Azure as fast as possible,” Hunkapiller explains. “We said, ‘Let's go VM [virtual machine] to VM, from AWS to Azure.” The result was a nearly one-to-one relationship between the old environment and the new one, down to the use of platform as a service (PaaS) for storage, data, and other components. “The simplicity of Azure really helps us, and that's our goal—to deliver something turnkey for the customer.”

“We fully took advantage of the tools in Azure to benefit our customers. Our customers need scalability, security, and speed.”

Dr. Ann Marie Sastry, Founder and CEO, Amesite

A lean architecture

The single-page application (SPA) architecture is lean by design. Customers interact with the Amesite platform through web apps with a front end that downloads the web SPA package into the client browser and communicates with the APIs. The web apps and APIs run on VM pairs for high availability. All traffic to the VMs goes through Azure Firewall, a cloud-native network firewall security service that provides advanced threat protection.

Data traverses segmented services, including the domain name server (DNS), a content delivery network (CDN), and firewalls, before being securely placed in Azure Blob Storage. From there, it can be referenced by the database servers.

According to Kalie Wortinger, Amesite Senior Manager, Innovation & Product, “We have very large datasets, and at Amesite, speed is of utmost importance—as is optimization. Who wants to sit while something loads for 5 to 10 seconds?”

The team chose to move to Azure Database for PostgreSQL. This deployment option works like the PostgreSQL server construct that the team was already familiar with. Each customer gets its own dedicated (hosting model) environment for the platform. Amesite benefits from built-in high availability and pay-per-use pricing with the option of reserved capacity pricing.

The move to Azure “was an opportunity for us in our code stack to be more secure and performant,” Hunkapiller notes. “Moving to Azure Database for PostgreSQL was quick and seamless since we could use PostgreSQL basic features.”

Wortinger agrees, adding, “With planning, this was a very easy transition. Our code stack was already modularized, and so we were able to adjust configurations governing communications between the code stack and the database. We had a relatively modest set of changes to the code stack to achieve integration.”

Hunkapiller also relates how “just turning on Azure Database for PostgreSQL to use it was an improvement in internet bandwidth, throughput, and transaction queries.” The combination of the team’s optimizations on top of Azure services helped query performance jump 50 percent.

Going forward, Amesite is evaluating Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL, a deployment option that uses sharding to scale queries across multiple machines and to serve applications that require greater scale and performance. The service was still being previewed when Amesite moved to Azure, and now the team is considering it for production.

Amesite discovered another opportunity to help customers. By using Azure Active Directory, it could offer a convenient single sign-on experience. “We are taking advantage of Active Directory as we set up integrations with our customers’ enterprise identity systems,” Hunkapiller reports. “We can utilize their user accounts—streamlined into our app stack—and not have to have duplicate user accounts.”

To help protect the environment, Amesite relies on a few other built-in Azure guardrails. For example, Azure Monitor collects monitoring telemetry both from on-premises and Azure sources.

Hunkapiller also points to the Azure SDKs as particularly valuable “to keep our architecture secure and scale with the ease for automation.” The SDK libraries make it easier for developers to use Azure services with the language of their choice.

Since automation was a driving factor throughout the project, Amesite leaned on the SDKs and APIs to keep integrations up to date and to support the growth that the company expects in the future. The team met another automation milestone by setting the foundation to implement continuous delivery—a key scalability requirement for the fast-growing company.

“Azure made it really simple to implement security. I've used AWS and other clouds, and it's always complex to turn it on. Microsoft made it very simple.”

Jonathan Hunkapiller, Director of Engineering Infrastructure, Amesite

Amesite targets delivery of ‘gourmet’ learning experiences—for millions

Sastry likens the move to serving a learning experience that’s a gourmet meal—for millions. “We focus on creating awesome learning experiences—gourmet meals rather than fast food for our customers and users,” she says. “To do that, we needed to be able to offer best-in-class engagement, with speed in standing up services and best-in-class responsiveness. So our plan was not simply to unplug from one cloud service and migrate to another. We wanted both quality and scale, so we simultaneously executed internal changes during migration that enabled us to fully leverage Azure and beat our mark of increasing our delivery speed by 50 percent to 60 percent. By implementing DevSecOps procedures simultaneously with migration, we can give our customers speed and quality and deliver a great experience for our users.”

As a disruptor in education technology, also known as edtech, Amesite strives for only the best. How else do you deliver the future of learning? By “combining Azure best-in-class services and Amesite code optimization,” Hunkapiller states. The company has cut its metered monthly costs in half while seeing an increase in internet speed of around 50 percent—on top of a 50 percent improvement in database query performance.

Amesite credits its success in part to the support it received from the Microsoft FastTrack team, on top of the Azure tools and operational processes it used to drive scale. According to Sastry, Amesite can now execute best-in-class security and greater degrees of automation. “We're delivering a complete software experience, while Microsoft is delivering the infrastructure. Together, we're very powerful.”

As Sastry sees it, the move to Azure “replaced serendipity with certainty” for a company that is moving to win new customers and create a huge impact. “The outcome is that, when we go to our customers, our system is scalable. Furthermore, partnering with Microsoft has been great for us. It's shorthand for, ‘The company that cares most in the world about data security, data privacy, and great infrastructure is our partner.’”

Her advice for other companies is to consider an Azure migration as a way to better meet customer objectives. “It’s not just a question of deciding, ‘We're going to rent VMs.’ It's a decision about the strategy of the company,” she explains. “We've had a great experience so far working with Microsoft, and we're really excited about the future and the things we're going to do together!”

“Combining Azure best-in-class services and Amesite code optimization, we have seen a 50 percent reduction in our metered monthly cost, 50 percent increase with internet speed, and 50 percent improved database query performance.”

Jonathan Hunkapiller, Director of Engineering Infrastructure, Amesite

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