Gate Academy offers various examination preparation courses for candidates looking for employment in the public sector. Candidates use the examination score for admission to various postgraduate courses such as Master of Technology (M.Tech) and Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) at a range of prestigious institutions. Gate Academy provides several learning platforms for students to receive the best education using reading materials along with guidance and lectures with experts from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc). Its online portal allows students to subscribe to courses and make online payments. Once enrolled, the students gain access to online classroom sessions and pre-recorded e-lectures. The web and various mobile interfaces help to spread the portal's digital footprint.

At Gate Academy, we wanted to enhance the user experience of our portal that demanded storage of large media and static content. We needed to ensure that all our content was accessible and with maximum uptime to serve a large number of applicants. Since our platform has multiple subdomain sites for different access portals, we needed a solution that could seamlessly handle traffic spikes during peak hours. In addition, we needed a scalable backend with a robust solution to provide maximum availability to users. Our platform ran multiple sites on a single domain and needed to store large data that was backed up regularly for disaster recovery. As our application was receiving a high volume of hits, it needed a database that was secure, well managed, and optimized for traffic fluctuations. The most important requirement was reliable security applications for the platform as it stored a huge amount of proprietary course content and also involved financial transactions.

We were already familiar with Alibaba Cloud's reputation as a high-performance and reliable cloud solutions provider, and we were impressed with their proposed architecture design which complimented our business viewpoint. Since our application processes data requests collected from a large number of users, Alibaba Cloud provides a highly available and scalable infrastructure that help us meet any increase in traffic and user requests. As our data storage needs grow, we know Alibaba Cloud can help accommodate this need with an infinitely scalable storage solution. Additionally, their Pay-As-You-Go model enables us to pay only for the resources we consume. With the support of Alibaba Cloud VPC, our technical team was also able to launch servers in a highly secure environment thereby enhancing the dependability and reliability of our platform.

Products Used: Server Load Balancer, Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Relational Database Service (RDS) We wanted an architecture that addressed our concerns for the main application while maintaining a robust storage and backup of resources. Alibaba Cloud offered us an elaborate database application architecture that ensures optimal performance. Server Load Balancer with multiple instances supports us in our endeavor by effectively distributing the server load among healthy instances. ECS is where the main application is deployed. Alibaba Cloud ECS instances can be flexibly increased or decreased depending on the traffic, which adds scalability to our application. Further, they added Alibaba Cloud ApsaraDB for RDS to provide backup and disaster recovery, which makes it extremely secure. RDS serves the database while VPC adds security to the architecture by putting all servers into a private network.