DNM accelerated Apierian's time to market by utilising Amazon Web Services

KIMMAGE, Ireland - June 24, 2014 - PRLog -- Apierian is a wholly owned subsidiary of Folens, a leader in Irish primary and post-primary education. With the wealth of education knowledge and material at their disposal, Apierian wanted to launch an online learning portal, initially for Irish Leaving Certificate students. The plan was to launch www.clevernotes.ie to provide a central hub for exam tips, sample exams and study notes built from their education content as well as contributions from leading teachers and examiners.

Apierian had a requirement for a software platform that could provide online learning, adaptive testing, tracking and end-to-end payment processing. On top of those functional requirements, Apierian were looking for a technical solution that would provide uncompromised availability and scalability on demand.

24/7 site availability is crucial to customer retention therefore the solution had to include hosting in an appropriate facility with redundancy and automatic failover of components to guarantee availability. Given the nature of the intended customers (students) these requirements will also be seasonal, with usage peaks expected before exams, while the summer months would be a relatively quiet period. The platform also needed to cater for unplanned events such as social media generated traffic which the portal should be able to adapt to in real time.

“We had extremely tight deadlines on the project to ensure we did not miss the peak demand times leading up to the next set of exams. It was a real challenge to finish the application development and build a highly reliable and scalable environment in time.” says Rob McCartney, Chief Operating Officer, Apierian.

Apierian partnered with DNM Technology to understand the current and potential future application architecture requirements which would influence technical design.  DNM helped Apierian to take conceptual architecture outline, through platform blueprint, to the final solution design. Based on detailed requirements analysis, DNM Technology produced an analysis document with various options and costs showing potential advantages and disadvantages for each option. Apierian chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the most flexible and cost effective cloud solution with the fastest go to market strategy.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offer a complete set of infrastructure and application services in the public cloud. Amazon charges on pay-per-use basis which replaces upfront capital investment with monthly bills. There is no obligation for long term contracts therefore companies can start large infrastructure projects with minimum spending, scale up as needed and more importantly scale back for off peak times.
In the case of Apierian, the following factors were essential in choosing AWS as a public cloud platform:
• Subscription model – Pay for what you use suited the solution and company’s business plan,
• Greenfield ite – Apierian had no existing IT infrastructure nor appetite to purchase / manage their own hardware,
• Flexibility – no contract required; service can be discontinued at any time without penalties,
• Technical capability of AWS – main components required for this type of project (Virtual machines, load balancers, content delivery network, cloud storage, auto-scaling) available as a service from Amazon,
• Cost-Effective – Lower cost compared to other public cloud providers. Easy to predict and optimise if required.

As a result, DNM built Apierian a fully resilient and easily scalable solution hosted in Amazon AWS cloud (EU zone/Dublin). The project was delivered ahead of schedule and provided the following benefits to the company and its users:
• Availability – designed to survive full outage of one of Amazon’s datacentres,
• Scalability – dynamic fully automated design, scale out and down depending on site load,
• Cost – deployed for fraction of cost compared to fully owned hosted hardware.

“Working with DNM to deploy on Amazon Web Services allowed us to deliver on our aggressive timelines, without requiring substantial up-front infrastructure costs. The high availability model coupled with pay as you go pricing made for a simple and compelling business case”, says Rob McCartney, Chief Operating Officer, Apierian.

About DNM

DNM Technology is a consultancy services company specialising in delivering global data solutions in business intelligence, database services, cloud services and enterprise architecture. Our core philosophy is about finding the best solution for our customers, unlocking value in their current investment, developing a future data vision and roadmap, and providing by augmentation or as a package, an end to end solution to meet their organisational needs. Our single-minded commitment delivers significant value added through years of experience and knowledge that supports our customers critical business information systems. We provide experienced resources to deliver and meet the day-to-day challenges of all your IT environments.