Beyond the Classroom: How AoPS Leverages AWS and DevOps for Success

🏢 ABOUT THE COMPANY

Art of Problem Solving (AoPS) is a unique company that caters to exceptional math students, producing books, classes, and other materials. Its distinctive approach focuses on nurturing critical and creative thinking with a curriculum that spans math, physics, programming, and language arts. AoPS encourages students to explore and persist, fostering a culture of problem-solving excellence.

⛰ CHALLENGES

AoPS wanted to modernize its infrastructure to support the changes it was making to its applications and address the issue it had when a customer purchased access to more than one product.

AoPS wanted to develop a solution to quickly move customers between its products: AoPS Academy, AoPS Online, Beast Academy, and future products.

✅ SOLUTION

Our partnership with AoPS was not just a technical collaboration, but a strategic one. We worked closely to identify and implement the most suitable solution to modernize its workloads, a decision that would significantly impact the company's future operations.

After a detailed assessment and discovery with the client, AoPS accepted the recommendation to run their applications on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) with AWS Fargate to run containers without managing servers or clusters of Amazon EC2 instances. That was the best choice since they had no DevOps team, and ECS with Fargate would allow them to focus on application development as they no longer had to provision, configure, or scale clusters of virtual machines.

Given the client's inputs during the assessment and discovery phase, I designed the following architecture to meet their needs:

With the goal of showcasing how AoPS could modernize its platform in AWS, this architecture was not just implemented but successfully in the client's staging environment as a PoC. This successful implementation instilled confidence in the project's progress and our direction.

Throughout the project, we maintained a high level of transparency and efficiency. Work progress was meticulously tracked through JIRA, and regular updates on the project status, including progress, issues, and plans, were communicated through Slack, ensuring all stakeholders were well-informed at all times.

🏆 OUTCOMES

This project highlighted the benefits that AoPS could gain by modernizing its infrastructure:

• Improved application performance and scalability.

• Enhanced system reliability and availability.

• Reduced operational overhead for the AoPS technical team.

• Faster and more efficient customer transitions between products.

• Reduced customer support inquiries related to technical issues.

Since the project also handled the adoption of deployment automation through CI/CD pipelines via CircleCI, the client could also leverage an operational efficiency increase:

• Automated processes and reduced manual intervention.

• Improved monitoring and alerting capabilities.

• Faster time to market for new products and features.

These short-term outcomes are not just immediate benefits but also the stepping stones to long-term success. They set the stage for the following long-term outcomes:

Enhanced Product Innovation:

• Increased ability to experiment with new technologies and approaches.

• Accelerated development of new products and features.

• Improved customer satisfaction and retention.

Competitive Advantage:

• Differentiation from competitors through superior technology and customer experience.

• Ability to adapt to changing market conditions and customer needs.

• Increased market share and revenue growth.

Cost Savings:

• Reduced infrastructure costs through efficient resource utilization.

• Lower operational expenses due to automation and streamlined processes.

Improved Security:

• Enhanced security posture through AWS's robust security features and best practices.

• Reduced risk of data breaches and cyberattacks.