PILLAR OF COURSERA :AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers — including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies — are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.AWS uses the concept of containerization internally . It is not only limited to one domain of education .It is used in almost in every domain for example Entertainment , Healthcare , Gaming , Telecommunications etc .AWS provides lots of services such most powerful service S3 .
Coursera is the world’s largest provider of massive open online classes (MOOC), with more than 150 university partners from 29 countries and more than 25 million registered students. Since its launch in 2012, the company’s educational offering has expanded from a handful of courses to some 2,000 offerings in 160 specializations, including business, computer science, and the humanities.
Coursera chose to use AWS CodeBuild to build its JavaScript applications because it wanted a managed build service that could scale automatically and process multiple builds concurrently. “It took us less than two weeks to set up our containers to run on AWS CodeBuild,” says Kane. “Now we can run 50 or 60 jobs in parallel, and the build time is only the time it takes for the longest application to build.”
The company also started using Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS) to deploy its JavaScript — and then used AWS CodeBuild to automate this step as well. Along with building the JavaScript assets and uploading them to Amazon S3, AWS CodeBuild also creates a Docker container that includes the assets and uploads it to Amazon EC2 Container Registry (Amazon ECR). “Now, whenever we want to deploy an application update, we use a tool that works with Amazon ECS to spin up a new service with the container running the new code,” says Kane
To build an application, all we need to do is retrieve the Docker image from the container registry, run the scripts, and upload to Amazon S3,” says Kane. “We don’t need to wait for the JavaScript dependencies to download because they are already pre-warmed in the container cache.”
By using AWS CodeBuild, Coursera has reduced its web-application build times by 83 percent while achieving a significant cost savings. “With AWS CodeBuild, our application build now takes about 10 minutes; using Jenkins it used to take up to an hour,” says Kane. “To get the same performance on Jenkins would cost four times as much because we would need to spin up 50 Jenkins instances to have the builds finish that quickly.”
On average, the company runs 300–500 builds each day using AWS CodeBuild, and because the service scales continuously and processes multiple builds in parallel, builds are not left waiting in queue. “If we needed to run 70 builds all at once, we could do so,” says Kane. “It’s great to be able to execute on demand and have elastic capacity that’s ready to go.”