The Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) was established for conducting Yearly Secondary School Stage examinations in Bihar based on the syllabus prescribed by the state government. Today, the board not just conducts secondary school examinations but also the departmental examinations Diploma in Physical Education, Certificate in Physical Education and Teachers Training Examination.
Challenges
BSEB takes care of the registration of new students for enrolment and conducts yearly examinations for them. The board would collate the data on the results of the examinations manually and declare the same through NIC (National informatic centre). Other processes like enrolment or registration and the issuing of admit card was also managed by BSEB.
The board faced some challenges as enrolments were increasing every year such as difficulty in maintaining data accuracy and increasing pressure to complete the formalities of registration and admission card issuing. Another challenge was that BSEB had no idea about how many students are using their website and mobile application. There was no analytics-processing layer to provide insights.
Solution
We offered BSEB a cloud solution for the hosting of their results data for 10th and 12th standards and applications for student registration and issue of admit cards. BSEB was suggested to implement AWS solutions considering their previous experience with some of its services by the staff earlier. While they were familiar with the technology, AWS also offered simplicity in configuration and in just a few weeks, BSEB website, its mobile application as well as video pipeline was migrated to AWS.
Implementation
Squaricle being Amazon partner for cloud computing helped BSEB implement set of Amazon services based on their application requirements. These included –
Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2): As the user base was not fixed and the data was increasing day by day in quantity, the organization needed to be flexible in its capacities. So, we implemented EC2 as it offered resizable compute capacity such that additional capacities could be configured easily as and when needed to build the infrastructure on the cloud.
Relational Database Service (RDS): The BSEB application was to handle a huge number of students as users at a time and this needed high speed in data retrieval which was possible only with a fast and reliable production database. RDS offers high availability, performance optimization, security and ease of administration. Managing database requires one to perform a variety of administrative tasks such as provisioning of hardware, setup, creation of backups, and timely patch ups. This was all managed through RDS automatically which made its administration easy. Moreover, AWS provided a variety of cost-effective storage options that we could optimize for desired performance of BSEB application.
Simple Storage Service (S3): BSEB needed to keep its historical data on examination results that were to be archived for records so that they could be retrieval later. S3 is a scalable storage solution that allows data to be stored in buckets and can handle any kind of data such websites, use cases, backups, mobile applications and more. Millions of application data is stored on S3 with 99.999999999% of its durability, a benefit that could not be missed when selecting it as an option for BSEB storage and archival.
BSEB cloud infrastructure today has a combination of database service, compute unit, and service with each offering high availability, durability, reliability, performance, scalability, and security. Its cloud application has registered over 5 lakh students over the website and mobile application and has handled tenfold traffic spikes than normal in peak seasons without compromising much in speed, reliability and performance
Results & Benefits
The mobile application used by the board has been used to register over 5 lakh students and this count continues to expand every year. BSEB believes in the capability of AWS to support this continuous growth. “As our user base continues to expand, we are extremely confident in our ability to support and manage that growth,” says the BSEB spokesperson. AWS, since its implementation, has proven its capability to do dynamic scaling as per the needs of the traffic spikes that happen during the special seasons.
“For a recent event on our website, we were expecting a fourfold increase in traffic, but what we actually saw was a tenfold increase. All we had to do was essentially turn on a switch, and we had more instances on AWS to support the spike. It was very fast and simple,” says the BSEB IT manager.
With AWS, BSEB can now capture insights about the usage pattern and preferences of students using the website and the mobile application. These insights could help the board make improvements in the application over time to make it unique and provide an effective and engaging user experience.