"Pearson Boosts Security and Productivity Using Amazon Elasticsearch Service"

"2020"
"Global educational media company Pearson needed a more efficient way to analyze
and gain insights from its log data. With a number of teams in various locations
using Elasticsearch\u2014the popular open-source tool for search and log analytics\
u2014Pearson found that keeping track of log data and managing updates led to high
operating costs. Faced with this, as well as increasingly complex security log
management and analysis, the company found a solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Pearson quickly saw improvements by migrating from its self-managed open-source
Elasticsearch architecture to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, a fully managed service
that makes it easy to deploy, secure, and run Elasticsearch cost effectively at
scale. Rather than spending considerable time and resources on managing the
Elasticsearch clusters on its own, Pearson used the managed Amazon Elasticsearch
Service as part of its initiative to modernize its products. "
"Shot of two young women using a laptop together in a college library"
"kr_quotemark"
"As we migrate to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, we can start to focus on what\
u2019s necessary from a security perspective. We can bring in different skill sets
and focus on what\u2019s more important to the company rather than just maintaining
standard hardware or infrastructure.\u201d "
"Muthu Meyyappan"
"VP of Security Engineering and Product Security Officer, Pearson"
"Meeting the Needs of the Modern World"
"As one of the largest and oldest educational companies in the world, Pearson
operates in 70 different countries. The company provides a wide variety of
educational content and assessments and other services, which are often specialized
for different target audiences. As the company moved toward digitization in the
cloud, it began to use AWS services. At first, Pearson used Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2)\u2014a web service that provides secure, resizable compute
capacity in the cloud\u2014to power its self-managed open-source Elasticsearch. But
the company found that a self-managed approach posed several challenges. \u201cOne
of the major issues we had was with the security portion of the fine-grained access
control\u2014we weren\u2019t able to work through that,\u201d says Muthu Meyyappan,
vice president of security engineering and product security officer for Pearson. \
u201cAnother challenge was maintaining the upgrades and the usual service
management below the line, which consumed the effort of a full-time engineer to
maintain the platform.\u201d"
"In order to iron out its access control to log data and reduce the amount of time
spent on updates, Pearson turned to Amazon Elasticsearch Service. \u201cWhen we
were updating the open-source Elasticsearch, it took time to make sure we didn\
u2019t miss any data,\u201d says Meyyappan. \u201cWe were looking to have someone
else take that accountability. If there is data lost, for example, Amazon
Elasticsearch Service enables us to go back 14 days and get the index back.
Features like that encouraged us to migrate to the managed service.\u201d"
"TestWe Turns to AWS to Drive Global Expansion"
"2021"
"In 2014, colleagues Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier and Charles Zhu came across a study
that indicated 95 percent of European students owned laptops. However, educational
institutions continued to rely on paper-based exams. That\u2019s when R\u00e9gnier
and Zhu decided to launch TestWe, a platform for administering in-class and remote
computer-based assessments. \u201cStudents were using their devices for taking
notes, research, and sending emails,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cIt only made
sense for them to use their laptops to take exams as well.\u201d"
"The TestWe solution gives students the ability to take exams securely, in the
classroom or at home. Educational institutions can administer digital exams while
eliminating the possibility of students getting help from online resources or other
people since the tests are taken offline and recorded by a camera. The TestWe exam
process runs in the cloud and can be fully integrated into a school\u2019s learning
management system. Additionally, the tests can run directly on any type of student
devices."
"Today, TestWe is available in seven different languages and used in countries
throughout Western Europe as well as in North and South America. Every year, TestWe
helps teachers create millions of test questions."
"Student studies outside"
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS services enhances our credibility. Partners and customers know our tests
will run reliably and scale easily.\u201d"
"Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier"
"Cofounder and Chief Commercial Officer, TestWe"
"Global Expansion Requires Greater Firepower in the Cloud"
"In the early years of the company, TestWe relied on a regional cloud-platform
provider to host its applications. The company then began to expand to markets
throughout Western Europe and into Canada and South America. R\u00e9gnier and Zhu
soon realized they needed to migrate their testing applications to a provider with
global capabilities\u2014one that could deliver applications from local regional
data centers. \u201cWe wanted to ensure students, teachers, and administrators
continued to experience fast performance when interacting with the tests, no matter
where they are located,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cAnd with a larger customer
base, we needed to make sure our cloud infrastructure could handle spikes in
activity.\u201d"
"University of Oxford Introduces a Sector-Leading Image Recognition ML Prototype to
Augment Digitization in Numismatics"
"2021"
"The University of Oxford houses 21 million objects in the collections of its
Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM)\u2014artifacts and specimens that are among the
world\u2019s most significant. One aspect of GLAM\u2019s mission is to preserve
these assets and make them accessible to the world for education and research.
However, the organization has only enough space to display about 10 percent of its
holdings at a time, and there\u2019s an enormous backlog of artifacts still waiting
to be cataloged. To tackle that obstacle, GLAM used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to
build an enhanced image recognition system that would help accelerate the process
of cataloging artifacts."
"The Gardens and Museums IT team used Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service
that provides developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and
deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. Powered by Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, the models were trained and deployed at low cost to
automatically catalog the extensive coin collection of the Ashmolean Museum\
u2014which is the United Kingdom\u2019s first public museum and the world\u2019s
first university museum. On AWS, the image recognition system identifies and
catalogs coins in a fraction of the time it would take human volunteers to complete
the same task."
"Exterior of the Ashmolean Museum."
"kr_quotemark"
"I thought this project would be complex and time consuming, but using AWS made it
easy.\u201d"
"Anjanesh Babu"
"Systems Architect and Network Manager, Gardens and Museums IT, University of
Oxford's Gardens, Libraries & Museums"
"Updating Infrastructure and Creating an ML-Based Cataloging System on AWS"
"GLAM comprises four museums\u2014the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, the
Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the
History of Science Museum\u2014as well as the Bodleian Libraries and the Oxford
Botanic Garden & Harcourt Arboretum. In 2019, GLAM saw 900,000 visitors to its
digital collections. Its 21 million objects include live specimens and plants,
historical artifacts, and even images of objects that were damaged, lost, or
returned to collectors. \u201cFor many years, the museums were not overly active at
investing in and managing the information technology infrastructure that underpins
all our digital services,\u201d says Anjanesh Babu, systems architect and network
manager at Gardens and Museums IT. \u201cAfter years of underinvestment in outdated
infrastructure, the University of Oxford brought together a strategic focus on
digital transformation through the GLAM Digital program.\u201d As part of this
program, the Digital Estate Improvement project was the foundational part to
deliver root and branch improvements to the infrastructure to make it fit to meet
the digital aspirations laid out in the objectives. In 2017, the project uploaded
60 TB of digital records to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object
storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance."
"UFE Mongolia Goes Online in 10 Days with AWS"
"2020"
"UFE-Mongolia_Customer-Reference_Image"
"kr_quotemark"
"The University had years and years of content. The challenge was how to move it to
the new system. Using AWS, it took us only three days.\u201d"
"Ankhtuya Dorisuren"
"Vice President, UFE"
"Founded in 1924, the University of Finance and Economics (UFE) is one of the
oldest educational institutions in Mongolia.It has over 6,000 students and more
than 300 employees and has successfully been running some online courses using on-
premises technology since 2015. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, UFE
used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to move all teaching online in less than two weeks,
enabling students to continue their studies remotely."
"On-Premises Infrastructure Not Up to the Job"
"At the beginning of 2020, UFE was using a local data center with two local
servers. But when more than 400 students tried to access it at once, the system was
overloaded, resulting in the entire learning management system going offline. The
local power supply was unreliable and the server would need to be restarted
manually after every power outage. Ankhtuya Dorisuren, UFE vice president,
explains: \u201cThis made it really difficult for students taking courses who lived
in the countryside and needed to access resources and teaching remotely.\u201d "
"In late January, the government of Mongolia announced a nationwide lockdown with
strict quarantine measures. All educational institutions closed within the space of
a week and overseas students were recalled home. This presented UFE with a problem:
how to continue providing all students with top-quality teaching while complying
with the lockdown restrictions. The speed of implementation was critical, as was
the need for an accessible and reliable system. UFE decided to transfer its entire
online learning management system to AWS cloud-based infrastructure\u2014and did so
within just 10-days."
"Uchi.ru Takes Lockdown Schoolchildren Online with AWS"
"2021"
"Uchi.ru became a first responder for education, keeping students learning, when
COVID-19 hit. The company provides school-age learning services around the world,
including Asia, Canada, Latin America, Russia, South Africa, and the USA.
Originally designed for use in the classroom and for extracurricular self-
education, its services employ an engaging, gamified approach to enhance
education."
"When the pandemic took hold, schools were shut down and the company found itself
having to provide remote learning for a much larger student audience. It rapidly
introduced new free services for schools, children, and teachers, providing large-
scale informational, methodological support for its school communities."
"The company soon found that its co-located servers were unable to cope with a
massive increase in usage, with more than 240,000 users now on the site at once,
compared to around 60,000 previously."
"Uchi.ru turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the urgent migration needed to
scale and meet the demand\u2014a migration that was achieved successfully and
quickly."
"Uchi-customer-references"
"kr_quotemark"
"The migration took three days. It wasn\u2019t business as usual and we were
outside our comfort zone, but it turned out to be fast, smooth, and practically
flawless in execution.\u201d"
"Alexey Vakhov"
"Chief Technical Officer, Uchi.ru"
"Turning to the Cloud to Cope with Overnight Demand"
"As the sector\u2019s largest educational technology provider, Uchi.ru had some
350,000 Russian speakers access its classroom services at least once a day at the
beginning of 2020. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, all schools closed with
little notice."
"The Uchi.ru team responded rapidly, introducing new distance-learning tools and
services to support students and teachers. They found extremely high demand for
distance learning and as a result, Uchi.ru was on the front line of education
provision, no longer an adjunct but of primary importance to the whole school-age
education system."
"Pomelo Fashion Enhances Shoppers\u2019 Experience, Increases Revenue Using Amazon
Personalize"
"2021"
"Pomelo Fashion, a global fashion e-commerce service based in Southeast Asia, had
been displaying items on its website in much the same way since it was founded in
2013. The setup had grown stale, not to mention that the algorithm for displaying
the items relied on old data streams with limited inputs and spotty accuracy. So as
a fast-growing, innovative startup, Pomelo Fashion set out to create personalized
customer experiences that would improve the discoverability of new items and
increase revenue\u2014and it needed a solution that would do so at scale. "
"Pomelo Fashion turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and used Amazon Personalize,
which enables developers to build applications with the same machine learning (ML)
technology used by Amazon.com for real-time personalized recommendations. By using
Amazon Personalize\u2014and the services of AWS Advanced Technology Partners
Segment and Braze\u2014to build fresh sorting and categorizing features, Pomelo
Fashion created a unique, personalized shopping experience that boosts customer
engagement and more efficiently converts it into sales."
"Smiling attractive young african woman"
"kr_quotemark"
"When you think of e-commerce, you think of AWS. New services are always coming out
on AWS, and support is very good.\u201d"
"Shane Leese"
"Business Intelligence Director, Pomelo Fashion"
"Updating a Years-Old Algorithm Using Amazon Personalize"
"Pomelo Fashion sells apparel online and in 18 retail locations throughout
Southeast Asia. Shipping to nearly two million customers in more than 50 countries,
the company currently employs 500 staff members across its corporate offices,
retail stores, and warehouses. Its gross revenue tripled from 2017 to 2018, doubled
from 2018 to 2019, and is on track to double in 2020 despite the overall global
economy being down\u2014in July 2020 alone, the company reported $7.5 million in
revenue. For years, Pomelo Fashion relied on an algorithm that ranked products on
category pages\u2014such as \u201cDresses,\u201d \u201cBlouses,\u201d and \
u201cPants & Bottoms\u201d\u2014based on page views and sales, blending the trends
of the past 30 days with lifetime behaviors, product price, and newest releases.
The rank was calculated daily and stored in a database, providing an identical
experience for every user by country. "
"Neiman Marcus Increases New Application Speed to Market by 50% on AWS, Improves
Digital Selling for Associates"
"2021"
"A luxury household name, Neiman Marcus has a reputation for delivering a first-
class, personalized customer service experience. To modernize and enhance that
experience, the company wanted to develop Connect, an omnichannel digital selling
application that would empower associates to view rich, personalized customer
information with the goal of making each customer interaction unforgettable. When
the COVID-19 pandemic forced many retail stores to close, the company\u2019s sales
moved exclusively online. To continue providing the hallmark experience that had
always attracted customers, Neiman Marcus needed to launch Connect quickly to
enable associates to perform digital selling. "
"Choosing a serverless architecture with mobile development solutions on Amazon Web
Services (AWS) enabled the development team to launch the app much faster than in
the 4 months it had originally planned. \u201cUsing AWS cloud-native and serverless
technologies, we increased our speed to market by at least 50 percent and were able
to accelerate the launch of Connect,\u201d says Sriram Vaidyanathan, senior
director of omni engineering at Neiman Marcus. This approach also greatly reduced
app-building costs and provided developers with more agility for the development
and rapid deployment of updates. The app elastically scales to support traffic at
any volume for greater cost efficiency, and it has increased"
"associate productivity."
"Female sales associate peruses clothing rack. "
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS Amplify on a serverless architecture cost us 90 percent less than if we
had built the app using a more traditional method. This is a huge win for us.\
u201d"
"Hemanth Jayaraman"
"Senior Director of Cloud Engineering, Neiman Marcus"
"Empowering Associates to Elevate the Customer Experience"
"Neiman Marcus is the flagship brand of the Neiman Marcus Group, a luxury retail
organization founded in 1907 and generating $2.6 billion in annual revenue from its
subsidiaries. Before Neiman Marcus developed Connect, associates were using an
assortment of tools and technologies to provide customer service. Each solution
provided a"
"different piece of information an associate needed to generate a sale. Some of
these solutions were outdated, and all of them were creating friction. As a result,
they were increasing sell times and decreasing associate productivity."
"AWS for Industries"
"AWS is How: HelloFresh Delivers a Personalized Experience to Millions of Customers
Around the World"
"by Ed Jimenez | on 21 MAY 2021 | in Amazon EMR, Amazon Simple Storage Services
(S3), Industries, Retail | Permalink | Comments | Share"
"Mealtimes are important sources of connection, comfort, and self-care. And though
we all have different lifestyles and preferences, we tend to crave similar
qualities when it comes to food: variety, novelty, nutrition, convenience, and
great taste. In essence, great food experiences are personal experiences that offer
plenty of choice and flexibility."
"HelloFreshEnter HelloFresh, the most popular meal kit in the world. HelloFresh
provides fresh, healthy, affordable ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes that are
delivered straight to your door. The company also operates a lean and innovative
supply chain designed to eliminate food waste, reduce carbon emissions, optimize
packaging, and favor local ingredient sourcing. With operations in 14 countries,
HelloFresh delivered more than 600 million meals to 5.3 million active customers
last year, providing organized, preportioned meal kits tailored to serve different
household sizes, schedules, and tastes. The HelloFresh approach to meeting diverse
needs, creating new menu options, and providing convenient delivery to each home it
serves depends on two crucial ingredients: maintaining a deep understanding of its
customers and staying agile across every aspect of its business, including product
development, production, and distribution."
"This is why HelloFresh uses Amazon Web Services (AWS). With AWS, HelloFresh gets a
reliable, global cloud infrastructure that easily scales to support the company\
u2019s growth around the world. With the help of AWS consultation and expertise,
HelloFresh has modernized its data capabilities, moving from its legacy database to
a data lake where it can centralize storage of both structured and unstructured
data. This makes it easier for HelloFresh to bring together information from
multiple data sources and use analytics tools to gather insights that it can use to
improve its services and create new offerings for customers. Using AWS, HelloFresh
maintains a closer connection to changing customer preferences and the flexibility
to quickly adapt its meal offerings and delivery services."
"HelloFresh runs much of its data management on Amazon Simple Storage Service
(Amazon S3), a service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance. It also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon
RDS) for automating time-consuming administration tasks related to database
management, such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.
Also important to HelloFresh data management is Amazon EMR, a big data platform
that makes it easier to process vast amounts of data using open source tools."
"See how HelloFresh is using AWS to deliver personalized customer experiences in
the new \u201cAWS Is How\u201d campaign. Learn how retail companies can use AWS to
build solutions that enhance customer experiences and deliver insights that improve
operations."
"BigBasket Grows Bigger with 400,000 Daily Orders on AWS"
"2021"
"Traffic Spikes Sixfold during Lockdown"
"The online grocery market in India is competitive and value-driven, with some 20
companies vying for shoppers in a market that\u2019s expected to hit $10.5 billion
by 2023. The central government\u2019s development of smart cities includes
infrastructure to support the growth of ecommerce, and many large companies are
making plays to get in on the action."
"BigBasket, India\u2019s largest online grocery, has been in business since 2011.
Customer retention is at the heart of its strategy, as well as a hyper-local
approach to inventory. BigBasket is available in 21 cities and runs its
infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The business had been
growing 20\u201330 percent each year, but when COVID-19 struck and India went into
lockdown, BigBasket faced unprecedented demand. Daily traffic was suddenly six
times higher than pre\u2013COVID-19 peaks."
"Big Basket"
"kr_quotemark"
"With AWS, we have all the pieces of the puzzle to smoothly run a large ecommerce
architecture."
"Rakshit Daga"
"Chief Technology Officer, BigBasket"
" "
"Microservices and Containers Boost Efficiency"
"BigBasket subscribes to AWS Enterprise Support and immediately consulted with the
AWS team for advice on scaling its architecture efficiently. \u201cAWS Enterprise
Support has been our go-to destination for all queries when we\u2019re building
something new or maintaining and enhancing existing functions,\u201d says Rakshit
Daga, chief technology officer at BigBasket. \u201cGiven the breadth of AWS
solutions we use, we have questions on all kinds of topics, and Enterprise Support
connects us to the right person quickly.\u201d"
"The company had already begun shifting to asynchronous work queues in 2018,
isolating workloads into containers and breaking up its monolithic architecture.
However, the onset of the 2020 lockdown shifted this process into high gear. By
mid-2020, the company was fully containerized with 60 microservices running on
Kubernetes."
"Gourmeat Boosts Efficiency and Productivity by 40% on Amazon Lightsail"
"2021"
"Gourmeat, a meat boutique founded in Uruguay and with US operations in Miami,
Florida, was using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to manage isolated inventories
manually, but this time-consuming process was hampering its growth. "
"Looking to modernize its data solution, Gourmeat turned to Amazon Web Services
(AWS) and AWS Select Consulting Partner Nub8. Within weeks, the company had a new
inventory management system hosted on Amazon Lightsail, a simple-to-use virtual
private server that offers everything needed to build a web application. Gourmeat\
u2019s integrated cloud-based inventory application reduces time spent on inventory
management, maintains reliable and secure data, and enables key decision makers in
the company to have simultaneous data access."
"Gourmeat storefront"
"kr_quotemark"
"Once we started using the solution built on Amazon Lightsail, inventory management
and report creation went from approximately 4 hours a week to less than 20
minutes.\u201d"
"Lucia Albanell"
"CEO and cofounder, Gourmeat"
"Moving to Integrated Inventory Management"
"Founded in 2013, Gourmeat sells hormone- and antibiotic-free meat online and in
stores in Uruguay and Miami. Before turning to AWS and Nub8, Gourmeat managed
inventory through manual reports from its vendors. \u201cThe old system used
isolated applications, and it didn\u2019t enable simultaneous access for decision
makers across the company,\u201d says Lucia Albanell, CEO and cofounder of
Gourmeat. \u201cThis resulted in inefficiencies and low confidence in data
quality.\u201d "
"Pearson Boosts Security and Productivity Using Amazon Elasticsearch Service"
"2020"
"Global educational media company Pearson needed a more efficient way to analyze
and gain insights from its log data. With a number of teams in various locations
using Elasticsearch\u2014the popular open-source tool for search and log analytics\
u2014Pearson found that keeping track of log data and managing updates led to high
operating costs. Faced with this, as well as increasingly complex security log
management and analysis, the company found a solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Pearson quickly saw improvements by migrating from its self-managed open-source
Elasticsearch architecture to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, a fully managed service
that makes it easy to deploy, secure, and run Elasticsearch cost effectively at
scale. Rather than spending considerable time and resources on managing the
Elasticsearch clusters on its own, Pearson used the managed Amazon Elasticsearch
Service as part of its initiative to modernize its products. "
"Shot of two young women using a laptop together in a college library"
"kr_quotemark"
"As we migrate to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, we can start to focus on what\
u2019s necessary from a security perspective. We can bring in different skill sets
and focus on what\u2019s more important to the company rather than just maintaining
standard hardware or infrastructure.\u201d "
"Muthu Meyyappan"
"VP of Security Engineering and Product Security Officer, Pearson"
"Meeting the Needs of the Modern World"
"As one of the largest and oldest educational companies in the world, Pearson
operates in 70 different countries. The company provides a wide variety of
educational content and assessments and other services, which are often specialized
for different target audiences. As the company moved toward digitization in the
cloud, it began to use AWS services. At first, Pearson used Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2)\u2014a web service that provides secure, resizable compute
capacity in the cloud\u2014to power its self-managed open-source Elasticsearch. But
the company found that a self-managed approach posed several challenges. \u201cOne
of the major issues we had was with the security portion of the fine-grained access
control\u2014we weren\u2019t able to work through that,\u201d says Muthu Meyyappan,
vice president of security engineering and product security officer for Pearson. \
u201cAnother challenge was maintaining the upgrades and the usual service
management below the line, which consumed the effort of a full-time engineer to
maintain the platform.\u201d"
"In order to iron out its access control to log data and reduce the amount of time
spent on updates, Pearson turned to Amazon Elasticsearch Service. \u201cWhen we
were updating the open-source Elasticsearch, it took time to make sure we didn\
u2019t miss any data,\u201d says Meyyappan. \u201cWe were looking to have someone
else take that accountability. If there is data lost, for example, Amazon
Elasticsearch Service enables us to go back 14 days and get the index back.
Features like that encouraged us to migrate to the managed service.\u201d"
"TestWe Turns to AWS to Drive Global Expansion"
"2021"
"In 2014, colleagues Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier and Charles Zhu came across a study
that indicated 95 percent of European students owned laptops. However, educational
institutions continued to rely on paper-based exams. That\u2019s when R\u00e9gnier
and Zhu decided to launch TestWe, a platform for administering in-class and remote
computer-based assessments. \u201cStudents were using their devices for taking
notes, research, and sending emails,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cIt only made
sense for them to use their laptops to take exams as well.\u201d"
"The TestWe solution gives students the ability to take exams securely, in the
classroom or at home. Educational institutions can administer digital exams while
eliminating the possibility of students getting help from online resources or other
people since the tests are taken offline and recorded by a camera. The TestWe exam
process runs in the cloud and can be fully integrated into a school\u2019s learning
management system. Additionally, the tests can run directly on any type of student
devices."
"Today, TestWe is available in seven different languages and used in countries
throughout Western Europe as well as in North and South America. Every year, TestWe
helps teachers create millions of test questions."
"Student studies outside"
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS services enhances our credibility. Partners and customers know our tests
will run reliably and scale easily.\u201d"
"Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier"
"Cofounder and Chief Commercial Officer, TestWe"
"Global Expansion Requires Greater Firepower in the Cloud"
"In the early years of the company, TestWe relied on a regional cloud-platform
provider to host its applications. The company then began to expand to markets
throughout Western Europe and into Canada and South America. R\u00e9gnier and Zhu
soon realized they needed to migrate their testing applications to a provider with
global capabilities\u2014one that could deliver applications from local regional
data centers. \u201cWe wanted to ensure students, teachers, and administrators
continued to experience fast performance when interacting with the tests, no matter
where they are located,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cAnd with a larger customer
base, we needed to make sure our cloud infrastructure could handle spikes in
activity.\u201d"
"University of Oxford Introduces a Sector-Leading Image Recognition ML Prototype to
Augment Digitization in Numismatics"
"2021"
"The University of Oxford houses 21 million objects in the collections of its
Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM)\u2014artifacts and specimens that are among the
world\u2019s most significant. One aspect of GLAM\u2019s mission is to preserve
these assets and make them accessible to the world for education and research.
However, the organization has only enough space to display about 10 percent of its
holdings at a time, and there\u2019s an enormous backlog of artifacts still waiting
to be cataloged. To tackle that obstacle, GLAM used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to
build an enhanced image recognition system that would help accelerate the process
of cataloging artifacts."
"The Gardens and Museums IT team used Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service
that provides developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and
deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. Powered by Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, the models were trained and deployed at low cost to
automatically catalog the extensive coin collection of the Ashmolean Museum\
u2014which is the United Kingdom\u2019s first public museum and the world\u2019s
first university museum. On AWS, the image recognition system identifies and
catalogs coins in a fraction of the time it would take human volunteers to complete
the same task."
"Exterior of the Ashmolean Museum."
"kr_quotemark"
"I thought this project would be complex and time consuming, but using AWS made it
easy.\u201d"
"Anjanesh Babu"
"Systems Architect and Network Manager, Gardens and Museums IT, University of
Oxford's Gardens, Libraries & Museums"
"Updating Infrastructure and Creating an ML-Based Cataloging System on AWS"
"GLAM comprises four museums\u2014the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, the
Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the
History of Science Museum\u2014as well as the Bodleian Libraries and the Oxford
Botanic Garden & Harcourt Arboretum. In 2019, GLAM saw 900,000 visitors to its
digital collections. Its 21 million objects include live specimens and plants,
historical artifacts, and even images of objects that were damaged, lost, or
returned to collectors. \u201cFor many years, the museums were not overly active at
investing in and managing the information technology infrastructure that underpins
all our digital services,\u201d says Anjanesh Babu, systems architect and network
manager at Gardens and Museums IT. \u201cAfter years of underinvestment in outdated
infrastructure, the University of Oxford brought together a strategic focus on
digital transformation through the GLAM Digital program.\u201d As part of this
program, the Digital Estate Improvement project was the foundational part to
deliver root and branch improvements to the infrastructure to make it fit to meet
the digital aspirations laid out in the objectives. In 2017, the project uploaded
60 TB of digital records to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object
storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance."
"UFE Mongolia Goes Online in 10 Days with AWS"
"2020"
"UFE-Mongolia_Customer-Reference_Image"
"kr_quotemark"
"The University had years and years of content. The challenge was how to move it to
the new system. Using AWS, it took us only three days.\u201d"
"Ankhtuya Dorisuren"
"Vice President, UFE"
"Founded in 1924, the University of Finance and Economics (UFE) is one of the
oldest educational institutions in Mongolia.It has over 6,000 students and more
than 300 employees and has successfully been running some online courses using on-
premises technology since 2015. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, UFE
used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to move all teaching online in less than two weeks,
enabling students to continue their studies remotely."
"On-Premises Infrastructure Not Up to the Job"
"At the beginning of 2020, UFE was using a local data center with two local
servers. But when more than 400 students tried to access it at once, the system was
overloaded, resulting in the entire learning management system going offline. The
local power supply was unreliable and the server would need to be restarted
manually after every power outage. Ankhtuya Dorisuren, UFE vice president,
explains: \u201cThis made it really difficult for students taking courses who lived
in the countryside and needed to access resources and teaching remotely.\u201d "
"In late January, the government of Mongolia announced a nationwide lockdown with
strict quarantine measures. All educational institutions closed within the space of
a week and overseas students were recalled home. This presented UFE with a problem:
how to continue providing all students with top-quality teaching while complying
with the lockdown restrictions. The speed of implementation was critical, as was
the need for an accessible and reliable system. UFE decided to transfer its entire
online learning management system to AWS cloud-based infrastructure\u2014and did so
within just 10-days."
"Uchi.ru Takes Lockdown Schoolchildren Online with AWS"
"2021"
"Uchi.ru became a first responder for education, keeping students learning, when
COVID-19 hit. The company provides school-age learning services around the world,
including Asia, Canada, Latin America, Russia, South Africa, and the USA.
Originally designed for use in the classroom and for extracurricular self-
education, its services employ an engaging, gamified approach to enhance
education."
"When the pandemic took hold, schools were shut down and the company found itself
having to provide remote learning for a much larger student audience. It rapidly
introduced new free services for schools, children, and teachers, providing large-
scale informational, methodological support for its school communities."
"The company soon found that its co-located servers were unable to cope with a
massive increase in usage, with more than 240,000 users now on the site at once,
compared to around 60,000 previously."
"Uchi.ru turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the urgent migration needed to
scale and meet the demand\u2014a migration that was achieved successfully and
quickly."
"Uchi-customer-references"
"kr_quotemark"
"The migration took three days. It wasn\u2019t business as usual and we were
outside our comfort zone, but it turned out to be fast, smooth, and practically
flawless in execution.\u201d"
"Alexey Vakhov"
"Chief Technical Officer, Uchi.ru"
"Turning to the Cloud to Cope with Overnight Demand"
"As the sector\u2019s largest educational technology provider, Uchi.ru had some
350,000 Russian speakers access its classroom services at least once a day at the
beginning of 2020. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, all schools closed with
little notice."
"The Uchi.ru team responded rapidly, introducing new distance-learning tools and
services to support students and teachers. They found extremely high demand for
distance learning and as a result, Uchi.ru was on the front line of education
provision, no longer an adjunct but of primary importance to the whole school-age
education system."
"Pomelo Fashion Enhances Shoppers\u2019 Experience, Increases Revenue Using Amazon
Personalize"
"2021"
"Pomelo Fashion, a global fashion e-commerce service based in Southeast Asia, had
been displaying items on its website in much the same way since it was founded in
2013. The setup had grown stale, not to mention that the algorithm for displaying
the items relied on old data streams with limited inputs and spotty accuracy. So as
a fast-growing, innovative startup, Pomelo Fashion set out to create personalized
customer experiences that would improve the discoverability of new items and
increase revenue\u2014and it needed a solution that would do so at scale. "
"Pomelo Fashion turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and used Amazon Personalize,
which enables developers to build applications with the same machine learning (ML)
technology used by Amazon.com for real-time personalized recommendations. By using
Amazon Personalize\u2014and the services of AWS Advanced Technology Partners
Segment and Braze\u2014to build fresh sorting and categorizing features, Pomelo
Fashion created a unique, personalized shopping experience that boosts customer
engagement and more efficiently converts it into sales."
"Smiling attractive young african woman"
"kr_quotemark"
"When you think of e-commerce, you think of AWS. New services are always coming out
on AWS, and support is very good.\u201d"
"Shane Leese"
"Business Intelligence Director, Pomelo Fashion"
"Updating a Years-Old Algorithm Using Amazon Personalize"
"Pomelo Fashion sells apparel online and in 18 retail locations throughout
Southeast Asia. Shipping to nearly two million customers in more than 50 countries,
the company currently employs 500 staff members across its corporate offices,
retail stores, and warehouses. Its gross revenue tripled from 2017 to 2018, doubled
from 2018 to 2019, and is on track to double in 2020 despite the overall global
economy being down\u2014in July 2020 alone, the company reported $7.5 million in
revenue. For years, Pomelo Fashion relied on an algorithm that ranked products on
category pages\u2014such as \u201cDresses,\u201d \u201cBlouses,\u201d and \
u201cPants & Bottoms\u201d\u2014based on page views and sales, blending the trends
of the past 30 days with lifetime behaviors, product price, and newest releases.
The rank was calculated daily and stored in a database, providing an identical
experience for every user by country. "
"Neiman Marcus Increases New Application Speed to Market by 50% on AWS, Improves
Digital Selling for Associates"
"2021"
"A luxury household name, Neiman Marcus has a reputation for delivering a first-
class, personalized customer service experience. To modernize and enhance that
experience, the company wanted to develop Connect, an omnichannel digital selling
application that would empower associates to view rich, personalized customer
information with the goal of making each customer interaction unforgettable. When
the COVID-19 pandemic forced many retail stores to close, the company\u2019s sales
moved exclusively online. To continue providing the hallmark experience that had
always attracted customers, Neiman Marcus needed to launch Connect quickly to
enable associates to perform digital selling. "
"Choosing a serverless architecture with mobile development solutions on Amazon Web
Services (AWS) enabled the development team to launch the app much faster than in
the 4 months it had originally planned. \u201cUsing AWS cloud-native and serverless
technologies, we increased our speed to market by at least 50 percent and were able
to accelerate the launch of Connect,\u201d says Sriram Vaidyanathan, senior
director of omni engineering at Neiman Marcus. This approach also greatly reduced
app-building costs and provided developers with more agility for the development
and rapid deployment of updates. The app elastically scales to support traffic at
any volume for greater cost efficiency, and it has increased"
"associate productivity."
"Female sales associate peruses clothing rack. "
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS Amplify on a serverless architecture cost us 90 percent less than if we
had built the app using a more traditional method. This is a huge win for us.\
u201d"
"Hemanth Jayaraman"
"Senior Director of Cloud Engineering, Neiman Marcus"
"Empowering Associates to Elevate the Customer Experience"
"Neiman Marcus is the flagship brand of the Neiman Marcus Group, a luxury retail
organization founded in 1907 and generating $2.6 billion in annual revenue from its
subsidiaries. Before Neiman Marcus developed Connect, associates were using an
assortment of tools and technologies to provide customer service. Each solution
provided a"
"different piece of information an associate needed to generate a sale. Some of
these solutions were outdated, and all of them were creating friction. As a result,
they were increasing sell times and decreasing associate productivity."
"AWS for Industries"
"AWS is How: HelloFresh Delivers a Personalized Experience to Millions of Customers
Around the World"
"by Ed Jimenez | on 21 MAY 2021 | in Amazon EMR, Amazon Simple Storage Services
(S3), Industries, Retail | Permalink | Comments | Share"
"Mealtimes are important sources of connection, comfort, and self-care. And though
we all have different lifestyles and preferences, we tend to crave similar
qualities when it comes to food: variety, novelty, nutrition, convenience, and
great taste. In essence, great food experiences are personal experiences that offer
plenty of choice and flexibility."
"HelloFreshEnter HelloFresh, the most popular meal kit in the world. HelloFresh
provides fresh, healthy, affordable ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes that are
delivered straight to your door. The company also operates a lean and innovative
supply chain designed to eliminate food waste, reduce carbon emissions, optimize
packaging, and favor local ingredient sourcing. With operations in 14 countries,
HelloFresh delivered more than 600 million meals to 5.3 million active customers
last year, providing organized, preportioned meal kits tailored to serve different
household sizes, schedules, and tastes. The HelloFresh approach to meeting diverse
needs, creating new menu options, and providing convenient delivery to each home it
serves depends on two crucial ingredients: maintaining a deep understanding of its
customers and staying agile across every aspect of its business, including product
development, production, and distribution."
"This is why HelloFresh uses Amazon Web Services (AWS). With AWS, HelloFresh gets a
reliable, global cloud infrastructure that easily scales to support the company\
u2019s growth around the world. With the help of AWS consultation and expertise,
HelloFresh has modernized its data capabilities, moving from its legacy database to
a data lake where it can centralize storage of both structured and unstructured
data. This makes it easier for HelloFresh to bring together information from
multiple data sources and use analytics tools to gather insights that it can use to
improve its services and create new offerings for customers. Using AWS, HelloFresh
maintains a closer connection to changing customer preferences and the flexibility
to quickly adapt its meal offerings and delivery services."
"HelloFresh runs much of its data management on Amazon Simple Storage Service
(Amazon S3), a service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance. It also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon
RDS) for automating time-consuming administration tasks related to database
management, such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.
Also important to HelloFresh data management is Amazon EMR, a big data platform
that makes it easier to process vast amounts of data using open source tools."
"See how HelloFresh is using AWS to deliver personalized customer experiences in
the new \u201cAWS Is How\u201d campaign. Learn how retail companies can use AWS to
build solutions that enhance customer experiences and deliver insights that improve
operations."
"BigBasket Grows Bigger with 400,000 Daily Orders on AWS"
"2021"
"Traffic Spikes Sixfold during Lockdown"
"The online grocery market in India is competitive and value-driven, with some 20
companies vying for shoppers in a market that\u2019s expected to hit $10.5 billion
by 2023. The central government\u2019s development of smart cities includes
infrastructure to support the growth of ecommerce, and many large companies are
making plays to get in on the action."
"BigBasket, India\u2019s largest online grocery, has been in business since 2011.
Customer retention is at the heart of its strategy, as well as a hyper-local
approach to inventory. BigBasket is available in 21 cities and runs its
infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The business had been
growing 20\u201330 percent each year, but when COVID-19 struck and India went into
lockdown, BigBasket faced unprecedented demand. Daily traffic was suddenly six
times higher than pre\u2013COVID-19 peaks."
"Big Basket"
"kr_quotemark"
"With AWS, we have all the pieces of the puzzle to smoothly run a large ecommerce
architecture."
"Rakshit Daga"
"Chief Technology Officer, BigBasket"
" "
"Microservices and Containers Boost Efficiency"
"BigBasket subscribes to AWS Enterprise Support and immediately consulted with the
AWS team for advice on scaling its architecture efficiently. \u201cAWS Enterprise
Support has been our go-to destination for all queries when we\u2019re building
something new or maintaining and enhancing existing functions,\u201d says Rakshit
Daga, chief technology officer at BigBasket. \u201cGiven the breadth of AWS
solutions we use, we have questions on all kinds of topics, and Enterprise Support
connects us to the right person quickly.\u201d"
"The company had already begun shifting to asynchronous work queues in 2018,
isolating workloads into containers and breaking up its monolithic architecture.
However, the onset of the 2020 lockdown shifted this process into high gear. By
mid-2020, the company was fully containerized with 60 microservices running on
Kubernetes."
"Gourmeat Boosts Efficiency and Productivity by 40% on Amazon Lightsail"
"2021"
"Gourmeat, a meat boutique founded in Uruguay and with US operations in Miami,
Florida, was using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to manage isolated inventories
manually, but this time-consuming process was hampering its growth. "
"Looking to modernize its data solution, Gourmeat turned to Amazon Web Services
(AWS) and AWS Select Consulting Partner Nub8. Within weeks, the company had a new
inventory management system hosted on Amazon Lightsail, a simple-to-use virtual
private server that offers everything needed to build a web application. Gourmeat\
u2019s integrated cloud-based inventory application reduces time spent on inventory
management, maintains reliable and secure data, and enables key decision makers in
the company to have simultaneous data access."
"Gourmeat storefront"
"kr_quotemark"
"Once we started using the solution built on Amazon Lightsail, inventory management
and report creation went from approximately 4 hours a week to less than 20
minutes.\u201d"
"Lucia Albanell"
"CEO and cofounder, Gourmeat"
"Moving to Integrated Inventory Management"
"Founded in 2013, Gourmeat sells hormone- and antibiotic-free meat online and in
stores in Uruguay and Miami. Before turning to AWS and Nub8, Gourmeat managed
inventory through manual reports from its vendors. \u201cThe old system used
isolated applications, and it didn\u2019t enable simultaneous access for decision
makers across the company,\u201d says Lucia Albanell, CEO and cofounder of
Gourmeat. \u201cThis resulted in inefficiencies and low confidence in data
quality.\u201d "
"Pearson Boosts Security and Productivity Using Amazon Elasticsearch Service"
"2020"
"Global educational media company Pearson needed a more efficient way to analyze
and gain insights from its log data. With a number of teams in various locations
using Elasticsearch\u2014the popular open-source tool for search and log analytics\
u2014Pearson found that keeping track of log data and managing updates led to high
operating costs. Faced with this, as well as increasingly complex security log
management and analysis, the company found a solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Pearson quickly saw improvements by migrating from its self-managed open-source
Elasticsearch architecture to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, a fully managed service
that makes it easy to deploy, secure, and run Elasticsearch cost effectively at
scale. Rather than spending considerable time and resources on managing the
Elasticsearch clusters on its own, Pearson used the managed Amazon Elasticsearch
Service as part of its initiative to modernize its products. "
"Shot of two young women using a laptop together in a college library"
"kr_quotemark"
"As we migrate to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, we can start to focus on what\
u2019s necessary from a security perspective. We can bring in different skill sets
and focus on what\u2019s more important to the company rather than just maintaining
standard hardware or infrastructure.\u201d "
"Muthu Meyyappan"
"VP of Security Engineering and Product Security Officer, Pearson"
"Meeting the Needs of the Modern World"
"As one of the largest and oldest educational companies in the world, Pearson
operates in 70 different countries. The company provides a wide variety of
educational content and assessments and other services, which are often specialized
for different target audiences. As the company moved toward digitization in the
cloud, it began to use AWS services. At first, Pearson used Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2)\u2014a web service that provides secure, resizable compute
capacity in the cloud\u2014to power its self-managed open-source Elasticsearch. But
the company found that a self-managed approach posed several challenges. \u201cOne
of the major issues we had was with the security portion of the fine-grained access
control\u2014we weren\u2019t able to work through that,\u201d says Muthu Meyyappan,
vice president of security engineering and product security officer for Pearson. \
u201cAnother challenge was maintaining the upgrades and the usual service
management below the line, which consumed the effort of a full-time engineer to
maintain the platform.\u201d"
"In order to iron out its access control to log data and reduce the amount of time
spent on updates, Pearson turned to Amazon Elasticsearch Service. \u201cWhen we
were updating the open-source Elasticsearch, it took time to make sure we didn\
u2019t miss any data,\u201d says Meyyappan. \u201cWe were looking to have someone
else take that accountability. If there is data lost, for example, Amazon
Elasticsearch Service enables us to go back 14 days and get the index back.
Features like that encouraged us to migrate to the managed service.\u201d"
"TestWe Turns to AWS to Drive Global Expansion"
"2021"
"In 2014, colleagues Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier and Charles Zhu came across a study
that indicated 95 percent of European students owned laptops. However, educational
institutions continued to rely on paper-based exams. That\u2019s when R\u00e9gnier
and Zhu decided to launch TestWe, a platform for administering in-class and remote
computer-based assessments. \u201cStudents were using their devices for taking
notes, research, and sending emails,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cIt only made
sense for them to use their laptops to take exams as well.\u201d"
"The TestWe solution gives students the ability to take exams securely, in the
classroom or at home. Educational institutions can administer digital exams while
eliminating the possibility of students getting help from online resources or other
people since the tests are taken offline and recorded by a camera. The TestWe exam
process runs in the cloud and can be fully integrated into a school\u2019s learning
management system. Additionally, the tests can run directly on any type of student
devices."
"Today, TestWe is available in seven different languages and used in countries
throughout Western Europe as well as in North and South America. Every year, TestWe
helps teachers create millions of test questions."
"Student studies outside"
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS services enhances our credibility. Partners and customers know our tests
will run reliably and scale easily.\u201d"
"Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier"
"Cofounder and Chief Commercial Officer, TestWe"
"Global Expansion Requires Greater Firepower in the Cloud"
"In the early years of the company, TestWe relied on a regional cloud-platform
provider to host its applications. The company then began to expand to markets
throughout Western Europe and into Canada and South America. R\u00e9gnier and Zhu
soon realized they needed to migrate their testing applications to a provider with
global capabilities\u2014one that could deliver applications from local regional
data centers. \u201cWe wanted to ensure students, teachers, and administrators
continued to experience fast performance when interacting with the tests, no matter
where they are located,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cAnd with a larger customer
base, we needed to make sure our cloud infrastructure could handle spikes in
activity.\u201d"
"University of Oxford Introduces a Sector-Leading Image Recognition ML Prototype to
Augment Digitization in Numismatics"
"2021"
"The University of Oxford houses 21 million objects in the collections of its
Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM)\u2014artifacts and specimens that are among the
world\u2019s most significant. One aspect of GLAM\u2019s mission is to preserve
these assets and make them accessible to the world for education and research.
However, the organization has only enough space to display about 10 percent of its
holdings at a time, and there\u2019s an enormous backlog of artifacts still waiting
to be cataloged. To tackle that obstacle, GLAM used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to
build an enhanced image recognition system that would help accelerate the process
of cataloging artifacts."
"The Gardens and Museums IT team used Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service
that provides developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and
deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. Powered by Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, the models were trained and deployed at low cost to
automatically catalog the extensive coin collection of the Ashmolean Museum\
u2014which is the United Kingdom\u2019s first public museum and the world\u2019s
first university museum. On AWS, the image recognition system identifies and
catalogs coins in a fraction of the time it would take human volunteers to complete
the same task."
"Exterior of the Ashmolean Museum."
"kr_quotemark"
"I thought this project would be complex and time consuming, but using AWS made it
easy.\u201d"
"Anjanesh Babu"
"Systems Architect and Network Manager, Gardens and Museums IT, University of
Oxford's Gardens, Libraries & Museums"
"Updating Infrastructure and Creating an ML-Based Cataloging System on AWS"
"GLAM comprises four museums\u2014the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, the
Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the
History of Science Museum\u2014as well as the Bodleian Libraries and the Oxford
Botanic Garden & Harcourt Arboretum. In 2019, GLAM saw 900,000 visitors to its
digital collections. Its 21 million objects include live specimens and plants,
historical artifacts, and even images of objects that were damaged, lost, or
returned to collectors. \u201cFor many years, the museums were not overly active at
investing in and managing the information technology infrastructure that underpins
all our digital services,\u201d says Anjanesh Babu, systems architect and network
manager at Gardens and Museums IT. \u201cAfter years of underinvestment in outdated
infrastructure, the University of Oxford brought together a strategic focus on
digital transformation through the GLAM Digital program.\u201d As part of this
program, the Digital Estate Improvement project was the foundational part to
deliver root and branch improvements to the infrastructure to make it fit to meet
the digital aspirations laid out in the objectives. In 2017, the project uploaded
60 TB of digital records to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object
storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance."
"UFE Mongolia Goes Online in 10 Days with AWS"
"2020"
"UFE-Mongolia_Customer-Reference_Image"
"kr_quotemark"
"The University had years and years of content. The challenge was how to move it to
the new system. Using AWS, it took us only three days.\u201d"
"Ankhtuya Dorisuren"
"Vice President, UFE"
"Founded in 1924, the University of Finance and Economics (UFE) is one of the
oldest educational institutions in Mongolia.It has over 6,000 students and more
than 300 employees and has successfully been running some online courses using on-
premises technology since 2015. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, UFE
used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to move all teaching online in less than two weeks,
enabling students to continue their studies remotely."
"On-Premises Infrastructure Not Up to the Job"
"At the beginning of 2020, UFE was using a local data center with two local
servers. But when more than 400 students tried to access it at once, the system was
overloaded, resulting in the entire learning management system going offline. The
local power supply was unreliable and the server would need to be restarted
manually after every power outage. Ankhtuya Dorisuren, UFE vice president,
explains: \u201cThis made it really difficult for students taking courses who lived
in the countryside and needed to access resources and teaching remotely.\u201d "
"In late January, the government of Mongolia announced a nationwide lockdown with
strict quarantine measures. All educational institutions closed within the space of
a week and overseas students were recalled home. This presented UFE with a problem:
how to continue providing all students with top-quality teaching while complying
with the lockdown restrictions. The speed of implementation was critical, as was
the need for an accessible and reliable system. UFE decided to transfer its entire
online learning management system to AWS cloud-based infrastructure\u2014and did so
within just 10-days."
"Uchi.ru Takes Lockdown Schoolchildren Online with AWS"
"2021"
"Uchi.ru became a first responder for education, keeping students learning, when
COVID-19 hit. The company provides school-age learning services around the world,
including Asia, Canada, Latin America, Russia, South Africa, and the USA.
Originally designed for use in the classroom and for extracurricular self-
education, its services employ an engaging, gamified approach to enhance
education."
"When the pandemic took hold, schools were shut down and the company found itself
having to provide remote learning for a much larger student audience. It rapidly
introduced new free services for schools, children, and teachers, providing large-
scale informational, methodological support for its school communities."
"The company soon found that its co-located servers were unable to cope with a
massive increase in usage, with more than 240,000 users now on the site at once,
compared to around 60,000 previously."
"Uchi.ru turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the urgent migration needed to
scale and meet the demand\u2014a migration that was achieved successfully and
quickly."
"Uchi-customer-references"
"kr_quotemark"
"The migration took three days. It wasn\u2019t business as usual and we were
outside our comfort zone, but it turned out to be fast, smooth, and practically
flawless in execution.\u201d"
"Alexey Vakhov"
"Chief Technical Officer, Uchi.ru"
"Turning to the Cloud to Cope with Overnight Demand"
"As the sector\u2019s largest educational technology provider, Uchi.ru had some
350,000 Russian speakers access its classroom services at least once a day at the
beginning of 2020. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, all schools closed with
little notice."
"The Uchi.ru team responded rapidly, introducing new distance-learning tools and
services to support students and teachers. They found extremely high demand for
distance learning and as a result, Uchi.ru was on the front line of education
provision, no longer an adjunct but of primary importance to the whole school-age
education system."
"Pomelo Fashion Enhances Shoppers\u2019 Experience, Increases Revenue Using Amazon
Personalize"
"2021"
"Pomelo Fashion, a global fashion e-commerce service based in Southeast Asia, had
been displaying items on its website in much the same way since it was founded in
2013. The setup had grown stale, not to mention that the algorithm for displaying
the items relied on old data streams with limited inputs and spotty accuracy. So as
a fast-growing, innovative startup, Pomelo Fashion set out to create personalized
customer experiences that would improve the discoverability of new items and
increase revenue\u2014and it needed a solution that would do so at scale. "
"Pomelo Fashion turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and used Amazon Personalize,
which enables developers to build applications with the same machine learning (ML)
technology used by Amazon.com for real-time personalized recommendations. By using
Amazon Personalize\u2014and the services of AWS Advanced Technology Partners
Segment and Braze\u2014to build fresh sorting and categorizing features, Pomelo
Fashion created a unique, personalized shopping experience that boosts customer
engagement and more efficiently converts it into sales."
"Smiling attractive young african woman"
"kr_quotemark"
"When you think of e-commerce, you think of AWS. New services are always coming out
on AWS, and support is very good.\u201d"
"Shane Leese"
"Business Intelligence Director, Pomelo Fashion"
"Updating a Years-Old Algorithm Using Amazon Personalize"
"Pomelo Fashion sells apparel online and in 18 retail locations throughout
Southeast Asia. Shipping to nearly two million customers in more than 50 countries,
the company currently employs 500 staff members across its corporate offices,
retail stores, and warehouses. Its gross revenue tripled from 2017 to 2018, doubled
from 2018 to 2019, and is on track to double in 2020 despite the overall global
economy being down\u2014in July 2020 alone, the company reported $7.5 million in
revenue. For years, Pomelo Fashion relied on an algorithm that ranked products on
category pages\u2014such as \u201cDresses,\u201d \u201cBlouses,\u201d and \
u201cPants & Bottoms\u201d\u2014based on page views and sales, blending the trends
of the past 30 days with lifetime behaviors, product price, and newest releases.
The rank was calculated daily and stored in a database, providing an identical
experience for every user by country. "
"Neiman Marcus Increases New Application Speed to Market by 50% on AWS, Improves
Digital Selling for Associates"
"2021"
"A luxury household name, Neiman Marcus has a reputation for delivering a first-
class, personalized customer service experience. To modernize and enhance that
experience, the company wanted to develop Connect, an omnichannel digital selling
application that would empower associates to view rich, personalized customer
information with the goal of making each customer interaction unforgettable. When
the COVID-19 pandemic forced many retail stores to close, the company\u2019s sales
moved exclusively online. To continue providing the hallmark experience that had
always attracted customers, Neiman Marcus needed to launch Connect quickly to
enable associates to perform digital selling. "
"Choosing a serverless architecture with mobile development solutions on Amazon Web
Services (AWS) enabled the development team to launch the app much faster than in
the 4 months it had originally planned. \u201cUsing AWS cloud-native and serverless
technologies, we increased our speed to market by at least 50 percent and were able
to accelerate the launch of Connect,\u201d says Sriram Vaidyanathan, senior
director of omni engineering at Neiman Marcus. This approach also greatly reduced
app-building costs and provided developers with more agility for the development
and rapid deployment of updates. The app elastically scales to support traffic at
any volume for greater cost efficiency, and it has increased"
"associate productivity."
"Female sales associate peruses clothing rack. "
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS Amplify on a serverless architecture cost us 90 percent less than if we
had built the app using a more traditional method. This is a huge win for us.\
u201d"
"Hemanth Jayaraman"
"Senior Director of Cloud Engineering, Neiman Marcus"
"Empowering Associates to Elevate the Customer Experience"
"Neiman Marcus is the flagship brand of the Neiman Marcus Group, a luxury retail
organization founded in 1907 and generating $2.6 billion in annual revenue from its
subsidiaries. Before Neiman Marcus developed Connect, associates were using an
assortment of tools and technologies to provide customer service. Each solution
provided a"
"different piece of information an associate needed to generate a sale. Some of
these solutions were outdated, and all of them were creating friction. As a result,
they were increasing sell times and decreasing associate productivity."
"AWS for Industries"
"AWS is How: HelloFresh Delivers a Personalized Experience to Millions of Customers
Around the World"
"by Ed Jimenez | on 21 MAY 2021 | in Amazon EMR, Amazon Simple Storage Services
(S3), Industries, Retail | Permalink | Comments | Share"
"Mealtimes are important sources of connection, comfort, and self-care. And though
we all have different lifestyles and preferences, we tend to crave similar
qualities when it comes to food: variety, novelty, nutrition, convenience, and
great taste. In essence, great food experiences are personal experiences that offer
plenty of choice and flexibility."
"HelloFreshEnter HelloFresh, the most popular meal kit in the world. HelloFresh
provides fresh, healthy, affordable ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes that are
delivered straight to your door. The company also operates a lean and innovative
supply chain designed to eliminate food waste, reduce carbon emissions, optimize
packaging, and favor local ingredient sourcing. With operations in 14 countries,
HelloFresh delivered more than 600 million meals to 5.3 million active customers
last year, providing organized, preportioned meal kits tailored to serve different
household sizes, schedules, and tastes. The HelloFresh approach to meeting diverse
needs, creating new menu options, and providing convenient delivery to each home it
serves depends on two crucial ingredients: maintaining a deep understanding of its
customers and staying agile across every aspect of its business, including product
development, production, and distribution."
"This is why HelloFresh uses Amazon Web Services (AWS). With AWS, HelloFresh gets a
reliable, global cloud infrastructure that easily scales to support the company\
u2019s growth around the world. With the help of AWS consultation and expertise,
HelloFresh has modernized its data capabilities, moving from its legacy database to
a data lake where it can centralize storage of both structured and unstructured
data. This makes it easier for HelloFresh to bring together information from
multiple data sources and use analytics tools to gather insights that it can use to
improve its services and create new offerings for customers. Using AWS, HelloFresh
maintains a closer connection to changing customer preferences and the flexibility
to quickly adapt its meal offerings and delivery services."
"HelloFresh runs much of its data management on Amazon Simple Storage Service
(Amazon S3), a service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance. It also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon
RDS) for automating time-consuming administration tasks related to database
management, such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.
Also important to HelloFresh data management is Amazon EMR, a big data platform
that makes it easier to process vast amounts of data using open source tools."
"See how HelloFresh is using AWS to deliver personalized customer experiences in
the new \u201cAWS Is How\u201d campaign. Learn how retail companies can use AWS to
build solutions that enhance customer experiences and deliver insights that improve
operations."
"BigBasket Grows Bigger with 400,000 Daily Orders on AWS"
"2021"
"Traffic Spikes Sixfold during Lockdown"
"The online grocery market in India is competitive and value-driven, with some 20
companies vying for shoppers in a market that\u2019s expected to hit $10.5 billion
by 2023. The central government\u2019s development of smart cities includes
infrastructure to support the growth of ecommerce, and many large companies are
making plays to get in on the action."
"BigBasket, India\u2019s largest online grocery, has been in business since 2011.
Customer retention is at the heart of its strategy, as well as a hyper-local
approach to inventory. BigBasket is available in 21 cities and runs its
infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The business had been
growing 20\u201330 percent each year, but when COVID-19 struck and India went into
lockdown, BigBasket faced unprecedented demand. Daily traffic was suddenly six
times higher than pre\u2013COVID-19 peaks."
"Big Basket"
"kr_quotemark"
"With AWS, we have all the pieces of the puzzle to smoothly run a large ecommerce
architecture."
"Rakshit Daga"
"Chief Technology Officer, BigBasket"
" "
"Microservices and Containers Boost Efficiency"
"BigBasket subscribes to AWS Enterprise Support and immediately consulted with the
AWS team for advice on scaling its architecture efficiently. \u201cAWS Enterprise
Support has been our go-to destination for all queries when we\u2019re building
something new or maintaining and enhancing existing functions,\u201d says Rakshit
Daga, chief technology officer at BigBasket. \u201cGiven the breadth of AWS
solutions we use, we have questions on all kinds of topics, and Enterprise Support
connects us to the right person quickly.\u201d"
"The company had already begun shifting to asynchronous work queues in 2018,
isolating workloads into containers and breaking up its monolithic architecture.
However, the onset of the 2020 lockdown shifted this process into high gear. By
mid-2020, the company was fully containerized with 60 microservices running on
Kubernetes."
"Gourmeat Boosts Efficiency and Productivity by 40% on Amazon Lightsail"
"2021"
"Gourmeat, a meat boutique founded in Uruguay and with US operations in Miami,
Florida, was using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to manage isolated inventories
manually, but this time-consuming process was hampering its growth. "
"Looking to modernize its data solution, Gourmeat turned to Amazon Web Services
(AWS) and AWS Select Consulting Partner Nub8. Within weeks, the company had a new
inventory management system hosted on Amazon Lightsail, a simple-to-use virtual
private server that offers everything needed to build a web application. Gourmeat\
u2019s integrated cloud-based inventory application reduces time spent on inventory
management, maintains reliable and secure data, and enables key decision makers in
the company to have simultaneous data access."
"Gourmeat storefront"
"kr_quotemark"
"Once we started using the solution built on Amazon Lightsail, inventory management
and report creation went from approximately 4 hours a week to less than 20
minutes.\u201d"
"Lucia Albanell"
"CEO and cofounder, Gourmeat"
"Moving to Integrated Inventory Management"
"Founded in 2013, Gourmeat sells hormone- and antibiotic-free meat online and in
stores in Uruguay and Miami. Before turning to AWS and Nub8, Gourmeat managed
inventory through manual reports from its vendors. \u201cThe old system used
isolated applications, and it didn\u2019t enable simultaneous access for decision
makers across the company,\u201d says Lucia Albanell, CEO and cofounder of
Gourmeat. \u201cThis resulted in inefficiencies and low confidence in data
quality.\u201d "
"Pearson Boosts Security and Productivity Using Amazon Elasticsearch Service"
"2020"
"Global educational media company Pearson needed a more efficient way to analyze
and gain insights from its log data. With a number of teams in various locations
using Elasticsearch\u2014the popular open-source tool for search and log analytics\
u2014Pearson found that keeping track of log data and managing updates led to high
operating costs. Faced with this, as well as increasingly complex security log
management and analysis, the company found a solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Pearson quickly saw improvements by migrating from its self-managed open-source
Elasticsearch architecture to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, a fully managed service
that makes it easy to deploy, secure, and run Elasticsearch cost effectively at
scale. Rather than spending considerable time and resources on managing the
Elasticsearch clusters on its own, Pearson used the managed Amazon Elasticsearch
Service as part of its initiative to modernize its products. "
"Shot of two young women using a laptop together in a college library"
"kr_quotemark"
"As we migrate to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, we can start to focus on what\
u2019s necessary from a security perspective. We can bring in different skill sets
and focus on what\u2019s more important to the company rather than just maintaining
standard hardware or infrastructure.\u201d "
"Muthu Meyyappan"
"VP of Security Engineering and Product Security Officer, Pearson"
"Meeting the Needs of the Modern World"
"As one of the largest and oldest educational companies in the world, Pearson
operates in 70 different countries. The company provides a wide variety of
educational content and assessments and other services, which are often specialized
for different target audiences. As the company moved toward digitization in the
cloud, it began to use AWS services. At first, Pearson used Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2)\u2014a web service that provides secure, resizable compute
capacity in the cloud\u2014to power its self-managed open-source Elasticsearch. But
the company found that a self-managed approach posed several challenges. \u201cOne
of the major issues we had was with the security portion of the fine-grained access
control\u2014we weren\u2019t able to work through that,\u201d says Muthu Meyyappan,
vice president of security engineering and product security officer for Pearson. \
u201cAnother challenge was maintaining the upgrades and the usual service
management below the line, which consumed the effort of a full-time engineer to
maintain the platform.\u201d"
"In order to iron out its access control to log data and reduce the amount of time
spent on updates, Pearson turned to Amazon Elasticsearch Service. \u201cWhen we
were updating the open-source Elasticsearch, it took time to make sure we didn\
u2019t miss any data,\u201d says Meyyappan. \u201cWe were looking to have someone
else take that accountability. If there is data lost, for example, Amazon
Elasticsearch Service enables us to go back 14 days and get the index back.
Features like that encouraged us to migrate to the managed service.\u201d"
"TestWe Turns to AWS to Drive Global Expansion"
"2021"
"In 2014, colleagues Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier and Charles Zhu came across a study
that indicated 95 percent of European students owned laptops. However, educational
institutions continued to rely on paper-based exams. That\u2019s when R\u00e9gnier
and Zhu decided to launch TestWe, a platform for administering in-class and remote
computer-based assessments. \u201cStudents were using their devices for taking
notes, research, and sending emails,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cIt only made
sense for them to use their laptops to take exams as well.\u201d"
"The TestWe solution gives students the ability to take exams securely, in the
classroom or at home. Educational institutions can administer digital exams while
eliminating the possibility of students getting help from online resources or other
people since the tests are taken offline and recorded by a camera. The TestWe exam
process runs in the cloud and can be fully integrated into a school\u2019s learning
management system. Additionally, the tests can run directly on any type of student
devices."
"Today, TestWe is available in seven different languages and used in countries
throughout Western Europe as well as in North and South America. Every year, TestWe
helps teachers create millions of test questions."
"Student studies outside"
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS services enhances our credibility. Partners and customers know our tests
will run reliably and scale easily.\u201d"
"Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier"
"Cofounder and Chief Commercial Officer, TestWe"
"Global Expansion Requires Greater Firepower in the Cloud"
"In the early years of the company, TestWe relied on a regional cloud-platform
provider to host its applications. The company then began to expand to markets
throughout Western Europe and into Canada and South America. R\u00e9gnier and Zhu
soon realized they needed to migrate their testing applications to a provider with
global capabilities\u2014one that could deliver applications from local regional
data centers. \u201cWe wanted to ensure students, teachers, and administrators
continued to experience fast performance when interacting with the tests, no matter
where they are located,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cAnd with a larger customer
base, we needed to make sure our cloud infrastructure could handle spikes in
activity.\u201d"
"University of Oxford Introduces a Sector-Leading Image Recognition ML Prototype to
Augment Digitization in Numismatics"
"2021"
"The University of Oxford houses 21 million objects in the collections of its
Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM)\u2014artifacts and specimens that are among the
world\u2019s most significant. One aspect of GLAM\u2019s mission is to preserve
these assets and make them accessible to the world for education and research.
However, the organization has only enough space to display about 10 percent of its
holdings at a time, and there\u2019s an enormous backlog of artifacts still waiting
to be cataloged. To tackle that obstacle, GLAM used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to
build an enhanced image recognition system that would help accelerate the process
of cataloging artifacts."
"The Gardens and Museums IT team used Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service
that provides developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and
deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. Powered by Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, the models were trained and deployed at low cost to
automatically catalog the extensive coin collection of the Ashmolean Museum\
u2014which is the United Kingdom\u2019s first public museum and the world\u2019s
first university museum. On AWS, the image recognition system identifies and
catalogs coins in a fraction of the time it would take human volunteers to complete
the same task."
"Exterior of the Ashmolean Museum."
"kr_quotemark"
"I thought this project would be complex and time consuming, but using AWS made it
easy.\u201d"
"Anjanesh Babu"
"Systems Architect and Network Manager, Gardens and Museums IT, University of
Oxford's Gardens, Libraries & Museums"
"Updating Infrastructure and Creating an ML-Based Cataloging System on AWS"
"GLAM comprises four museums\u2014the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, the
Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the
History of Science Museum\u2014as well as the Bodleian Libraries and the Oxford
Botanic Garden & Harcourt Arboretum. In 2019, GLAM saw 900,000 visitors to its
digital collections. Its 21 million objects include live specimens and plants,
historical artifacts, and even images of objects that were damaged, lost, or
returned to collectors. \u201cFor many years, the museums were not overly active at
investing in and managing the information technology infrastructure that underpins
all our digital services,\u201d says Anjanesh Babu, systems architect and network
manager at Gardens and Museums IT. \u201cAfter years of underinvestment in outdated
infrastructure, the University of Oxford brought together a strategic focus on
digital transformation through the GLAM Digital program.\u201d As part of this
program, the Digital Estate Improvement project was the foundational part to
deliver root and branch improvements to the infrastructure to make it fit to meet
the digital aspirations laid out in the objectives. In 2017, the project uploaded
60 TB of digital records to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object
storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance."
"UFE Mongolia Goes Online in 10 Days with AWS"
"2020"
"UFE-Mongolia_Customer-Reference_Image"
"kr_quotemark"
"The University had years and years of content. The challenge was how to move it to
the new system. Using AWS, it took us only three days.\u201d"
"Ankhtuya Dorisuren"
"Vice President, UFE"
"Founded in 1924, the University of Finance and Economics (UFE) is one of the
oldest educational institutions in Mongolia.It has over 6,000 students and more
than 300 employees and has successfully been running some online courses using on-
premises technology since 2015. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, UFE
used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to move all teaching online in less than two weeks,
enabling students to continue their studies remotely."
"On-Premises Infrastructure Not Up to the Job"
"At the beginning of 2020, UFE was using a local data center with two local
servers. But when more than 400 students tried to access it at once, the system was
overloaded, resulting in the entire learning management system going offline. The
local power supply was unreliable and the server would need to be restarted
manually after every power outage. Ankhtuya Dorisuren, UFE vice president,
explains: \u201cThis made it really difficult for students taking courses who lived
in the countryside and needed to access resources and teaching remotely.\u201d "
"In late January, the government of Mongolia announced a nationwide lockdown with
strict quarantine measures. All educational institutions closed within the space of
a week and overseas students were recalled home. This presented UFE with a problem:
how to continue providing all students with top-quality teaching while complying
with the lockdown restrictions. The speed of implementation was critical, as was
the need for an accessible and reliable system. UFE decided to transfer its entire
online learning management system to AWS cloud-based infrastructure\u2014and did so
within just 10-days."
"Uchi.ru Takes Lockdown Schoolchildren Online with AWS"
"2021"
"Uchi.ru became a first responder for education, keeping students learning, when
COVID-19 hit. The company provides school-age learning services around the world,
including Asia, Canada, Latin America, Russia, South Africa, and the USA.
Originally designed for use in the classroom and for extracurricular self-
education, its services employ an engaging, gamified approach to enhance
education."
"When the pandemic took hold, schools were shut down and the company found itself
having to provide remote learning for a much larger student audience. It rapidly
introduced new free services for schools, children, and teachers, providing large-
scale informational, methodological support for its school communities."
"The company soon found that its co-located servers were unable to cope with a
massive increase in usage, with more than 240,000 users now on the site at once,
compared to around 60,000 previously."
"Uchi.ru turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the urgent migration needed to
scale and meet the demand\u2014a migration that was achieved successfully and
quickly."
"Uchi-customer-references"
"kr_quotemark"
"The migration took three days. It wasn\u2019t business as usual and we were
outside our comfort zone, but it turned out to be fast, smooth, and practically
flawless in execution.\u201d"
"Alexey Vakhov"
"Chief Technical Officer, Uchi.ru"
"Turning to the Cloud to Cope with Overnight Demand"
"As the sector\u2019s largest educational technology provider, Uchi.ru had some
350,000 Russian speakers access its classroom services at least once a day at the
beginning of 2020. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, all schools closed with
little notice."
"The Uchi.ru team responded rapidly, introducing new distance-learning tools and
services to support students and teachers. They found extremely high demand for
distance learning and as a result, Uchi.ru was on the front line of education
provision, no longer an adjunct but of primary importance to the whole school-age
education system."
"Pomelo Fashion Enhances Shoppers\u2019 Experience, Increases Revenue Using Amazon
Personalize"
"2021"
"Pomelo Fashion, a global fashion e-commerce service based in Southeast Asia, had
been displaying items on its website in much the same way since it was founded in
2013. The setup had grown stale, not to mention that the algorithm for displaying
the items relied on old data streams with limited inputs and spotty accuracy. So as
a fast-growing, innovative startup, Pomelo Fashion set out to create personalized
customer experiences that would improve the discoverability of new items and
increase revenue\u2014and it needed a solution that would do so at scale. "
"Pomelo Fashion turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and used Amazon Personalize,
which enables developers to build applications with the same machine learning (ML)
technology used by Amazon.com for real-time personalized recommendations. By using
Amazon Personalize\u2014and the services of AWS Advanced Technology Partners
Segment and Braze\u2014to build fresh sorting and categorizing features, Pomelo
Fashion created a unique, personalized shopping experience that boosts customer
engagement and more efficiently converts it into sales."
"Smiling attractive young african woman"
"kr_quotemark"
"When you think of e-commerce, you think of AWS. New services are always coming out
on AWS, and support is very good.\u201d"
"Shane Leese"
"Business Intelligence Director, Pomelo Fashion"
"Updating a Years-Old Algorithm Using Amazon Personalize"
"Pomelo Fashion sells apparel online and in 18 retail locations throughout
Southeast Asia. Shipping to nearly two million customers in more than 50 countries,
the company currently employs 500 staff members across its corporate offices,
retail stores, and warehouses. Its gross revenue tripled from 2017 to 2018, doubled
from 2018 to 2019, and is on track to double in 2020 despite the overall global
economy being down\u2014in July 2020 alone, the company reported $7.5 million in
revenue. For years, Pomelo Fashion relied on an algorithm that ranked products on
category pages\u2014such as \u201cDresses,\u201d \u201cBlouses,\u201d and \
u201cPants & Bottoms\u201d\u2014based on page views and sales, blending the trends
of the past 30 days with lifetime behaviors, product price, and newest releases.
The rank was calculated daily and stored in a database, providing an identical
experience for every user by country. "
"Neiman Marcus Increases New Application Speed to Market by 50% on AWS, Improves
Digital Selling for Associates"
"2021"
"A luxury household name, Neiman Marcus has a reputation for delivering a first-
class, personalized customer service experience. To modernize and enhance that
experience, the company wanted to develop Connect, an omnichannel digital selling
application that would empower associates to view rich, personalized customer
information with the goal of making each customer interaction unforgettable. When
the COVID-19 pandemic forced many retail stores to close, the company\u2019s sales
moved exclusively online. To continue providing the hallmark experience that had
always attracted customers, Neiman Marcus needed to launch Connect quickly to
enable associates to perform digital selling. "
"Choosing a serverless architecture with mobile development solutions on Amazon Web
Services (AWS) enabled the development team to launch the app much faster than in
the 4 months it had originally planned. \u201cUsing AWS cloud-native and serverless
technologies, we increased our speed to market by at least 50 percent and were able
to accelerate the launch of Connect,\u201d says Sriram Vaidyanathan, senior
director of omni engineering at Neiman Marcus. This approach also greatly reduced
app-building costs and provided developers with more agility for the development
and rapid deployment of updates. The app elastically scales to support traffic at
any volume for greater cost efficiency, and it has increased"
"associate productivity."
"Female sales associate peruses clothing rack. "
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS Amplify on a serverless architecture cost us 90 percent less than if we
had built the app using a more traditional method. This is a huge win for us.\
u201d"
"Hemanth Jayaraman"
"Senior Director of Cloud Engineering, Neiman Marcus"
"Empowering Associates to Elevate the Customer Experience"
"Neiman Marcus is the flagship brand of the Neiman Marcus Group, a luxury retail
organization founded in 1907 and generating $2.6 billion in annual revenue from its
subsidiaries. Before Neiman Marcus developed Connect, associates were using an
assortment of tools and technologies to provide customer service. Each solution
provided a"
"different piece of information an associate needed to generate a sale. Some of
these solutions were outdated, and all of them were creating friction. As a result,
they were increasing sell times and decreasing associate productivity."
"AWS for Industries"
"AWS is How: HelloFresh Delivers a Personalized Experience to Millions of Customers
Around the World"
"by Ed Jimenez | on 21 MAY 2021 | in Amazon EMR, Amazon Simple Storage Services
(S3), Industries, Retail | Permalink | Comments | Share"
"Mealtimes are important sources of connection, comfort, and self-care. And though
we all have different lifestyles and preferences, we tend to crave similar
qualities when it comes to food: variety, novelty, nutrition, convenience, and
great taste. In essence, great food experiences are personal experiences that offer
plenty of choice and flexibility."
"HelloFreshEnter HelloFresh, the most popular meal kit in the world. HelloFresh
provides fresh, healthy, affordable ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes that are
delivered straight to your door. The company also operates a lean and innovative
supply chain designed to eliminate food waste, reduce carbon emissions, optimize
packaging, and favor local ingredient sourcing. With operations in 14 countries,
HelloFresh delivered more than 600 million meals to 5.3 million active customers
last year, providing organized, preportioned meal kits tailored to serve different
household sizes, schedules, and tastes. The HelloFresh approach to meeting diverse
needs, creating new menu options, and providing convenient delivery to each home it
serves depends on two crucial ingredients: maintaining a deep understanding of its
customers and staying agile across every aspect of its business, including product
development, production, and distribution."
"This is why HelloFresh uses Amazon Web Services (AWS). With AWS, HelloFresh gets a
reliable, global cloud infrastructure that easily scales to support the company\
u2019s growth around the world. With the help of AWS consultation and expertise,
HelloFresh has modernized its data capabilities, moving from its legacy database to
a data lake where it can centralize storage of both structured and unstructured
data. This makes it easier for HelloFresh to bring together information from
multiple data sources and use analytics tools to gather insights that it can use to
improve its services and create new offerings for customers. Using AWS, HelloFresh
maintains a closer connection to changing customer preferences and the flexibility
to quickly adapt its meal offerings and delivery services."
"HelloFresh runs much of its data management on Amazon Simple Storage Service
(Amazon S3), a service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance. It also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon
RDS) for automating time-consuming administration tasks related to database
management, such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.
Also important to HelloFresh data management is Amazon EMR, a big data platform
that makes it easier to process vast amounts of data using open source tools."
"See how HelloFresh is using AWS to deliver personalized customer experiences in
the new \u201cAWS Is How\u201d campaign. Learn how retail companies can use AWS to
build solutions that enhance customer experiences and deliver insights that improve
operations."
"BigBasket Grows Bigger with 400,000 Daily Orders on AWS"
"2021"
"Traffic Spikes Sixfold during Lockdown"
"The online grocery market in India is competitive and value-driven, with some 20
companies vying for shoppers in a market that\u2019s expected to hit $10.5 billion
by 2023. The central government\u2019s development of smart cities includes
infrastructure to support the growth of ecommerce, and many large companies are
making plays to get in on the action."
"BigBasket, India\u2019s largest online grocery, has been in business since 2011.
Customer retention is at the heart of its strategy, as well as a hyper-local
approach to inventory. BigBasket is available in 21 cities and runs its
infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The business had been
growing 20\u201330 percent each year, but when COVID-19 struck and India went into
lockdown, BigBasket faced unprecedented demand. Daily traffic was suddenly six
times higher than pre\u2013COVID-19 peaks."
"Big Basket"
"kr_quotemark"
"With AWS, we have all the pieces of the puzzle to smoothly run a large ecommerce
architecture."
"Rakshit Daga"
"Chief Technology Officer, BigBasket"
" "
"Microservices and Containers Boost Efficiency"
"BigBasket subscribes to AWS Enterprise Support and immediately consulted with the
AWS team for advice on scaling its architecture efficiently. \u201cAWS Enterprise
Support has been our go-to destination for all queries when we\u2019re building
something new or maintaining and enhancing existing functions,\u201d says Rakshit
Daga, chief technology officer at BigBasket. \u201cGiven the breadth of AWS
solutions we use, we have questions on all kinds of topics, and Enterprise Support
connects us to the right person quickly.\u201d"
"The company had already begun shifting to asynchronous work queues in 2018,
isolating workloads into containers and breaking up its monolithic architecture.
However, the onset of the 2020 lockdown shifted this process into high gear. By
mid-2020, the company was fully containerized with 60 microservices running on
Kubernetes."
"Gourmeat Boosts Efficiency and Productivity by 40% on Amazon Lightsail"
"2021"
"Gourmeat, a meat boutique founded in Uruguay and with US operations in Miami,
Florida, was using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to manage isolated inventories
manually, but this time-consuming process was hampering its growth. "
"Looking to modernize its data solution, Gourmeat turned to Amazon Web Services
(AWS) and AWS Select Consulting Partner Nub8. Within weeks, the company had a new
inventory management system hosted on Amazon Lightsail, a simple-to-use virtual
private server that offers everything needed to build a web application. Gourmeat\
u2019s integrated cloud-based inventory application reduces time spent on inventory
management, maintains reliable and secure data, and enables key decision makers in
the company to have simultaneous data access."
"Gourmeat storefront"
"kr_quotemark"
"Once we started using the solution built on Amazon Lightsail, inventory management
and report creation went from approximately 4 hours a week to less than 20
minutes.\u201d"
"Lucia Albanell"
"CEO and cofounder, Gourmeat"
"Moving to Integrated Inventory Management"
"Founded in 2013, Gourmeat sells hormone- and antibiotic-free meat online and in
stores in Uruguay and Miami. Before turning to AWS and Nub8, Gourmeat managed
inventory through manual reports from its vendors. \u201cThe old system used
isolated applications, and it didn\u2019t enable simultaneous access for decision
makers across the company,\u201d says Lucia Albanell, CEO and cofounder of
Gourmeat. \u201cThis resulted in inefficiencies and low confidence in data
quality.\u201d "
"Pearson Boosts Security and Productivity Using Amazon Elasticsearch Service"
"2020"
"Global educational media company Pearson needed a more efficient way to analyze
and gain insights from its log data. With a number of teams in various locations
using Elasticsearch\u2014the popular open-source tool for search and log analytics\
u2014Pearson found that keeping track of log data and managing updates led to high
operating costs. Faced with this, as well as increasingly complex security log
management and analysis, the company found a solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Pearson quickly saw improvements by migrating from its self-managed open-source
Elasticsearch architecture to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, a fully managed service
that makes it easy to deploy, secure, and run Elasticsearch cost effectively at
scale. Rather than spending considerable time and resources on managing the
Elasticsearch clusters on its own, Pearson used the managed Amazon Elasticsearch
Service as part of its initiative to modernize its products. "
"Shot of two young women using a laptop together in a college library"
"kr_quotemark"
"As we migrate to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, we can start to focus on what\
u2019s necessary from a security perspective. We can bring in different skill sets
and focus on what\u2019s more important to the company rather than just maintaining
standard hardware or infrastructure.\u201d "
"Muthu Meyyappan"
"VP of Security Engineering and Product Security Officer, Pearson"
"Meeting the Needs of the Modern World"
"As one of the largest and oldest educational companies in the world, Pearson
operates in 70 different countries. The company provides a wide variety of
educational content and assessments and other services, which are often specialized
for different target audiences. As the company moved toward digitization in the
cloud, it began to use AWS services. At first, Pearson used Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2)\u2014a web service that provides secure, resizable compute
capacity in the cloud\u2014to power its self-managed open-source Elasticsearch. But
the company found that a self-managed approach posed several challenges. \u201cOne
of the major issues we had was with the security portion of the fine-grained access
control\u2014we weren\u2019t able to work through that,\u201d says Muthu Meyyappan,
vice president of security engineering and product security officer for Pearson. \
u201cAnother challenge was maintaining the upgrades and the usual service
management below the line, which consumed the effort of a full-time engineer to
maintain the platform.\u201d"
"In order to iron out its access control to log data and reduce the amount of time
spent on updates, Pearson turned to Amazon Elasticsearch Service. \u201cWhen we
were updating the open-source Elasticsearch, it took time to make sure we didn\
u2019t miss any data,\u201d says Meyyappan. \u201cWe were looking to have someone
else take that accountability. If there is data lost, for example, Amazon
Elasticsearch Service enables us to go back 14 days and get the index back.
Features like that encouraged us to migrate to the managed service.\u201d"
"TestWe Turns to AWS to Drive Global Expansion"
"2021"
"In 2014, colleagues Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier and Charles Zhu came across a study
that indicated 95 percent of European students owned laptops. However, educational
institutions continued to rely on paper-based exams. That\u2019s when R\u00e9gnier
and Zhu decided to launch TestWe, a platform for administering in-class and remote
computer-based assessments. \u201cStudents were using their devices for taking
notes, research, and sending emails,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cIt only made
sense for them to use their laptops to take exams as well.\u201d"
"The TestWe solution gives students the ability to take exams securely, in the
classroom or at home. Educational institutions can administer digital exams while
eliminating the possibility of students getting help from online resources or other
people since the tests are taken offline and recorded by a camera. The TestWe exam
process runs in the cloud and can be fully integrated into a school\u2019s learning
management system. Additionally, the tests can run directly on any type of student
devices."
"Today, TestWe is available in seven different languages and used in countries
throughout Western Europe as well as in North and South America. Every year, TestWe
helps teachers create millions of test questions."
"Student studies outside"
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS services enhances our credibility. Partners and customers know our tests
will run reliably and scale easily.\u201d"
"Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier"
"Cofounder and Chief Commercial Officer, TestWe"
"Global Expansion Requires Greater Firepower in the Cloud"
"In the early years of the company, TestWe relied on a regional cloud-platform
provider to host its applications. The company then began to expand to markets
throughout Western Europe and into Canada and South America. R\u00e9gnier and Zhu
soon realized they needed to migrate their testing applications to a provider with
global capabilities\u2014one that could deliver applications from local regional
data centers. \u201cWe wanted to ensure students, teachers, and administrators
continued to experience fast performance when interacting with the tests, no matter
where they are located,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cAnd with a larger customer
base, we needed to make sure our cloud infrastructure could handle spikes in
activity.\u201d"
"University of Oxford Introduces a Sector-Leading Image Recognition ML Prototype to
Augment Digitization in Numismatics"
"2021"
"The University of Oxford houses 21 million objects in the collections of its
Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM)\u2014artifacts and specimens that are among the
world\u2019s most significant. One aspect of GLAM\u2019s mission is to preserve
these assets and make them accessible to the world for education and research.
However, the organization has only enough space to display about 10 percent of its
holdings at a time, and there\u2019s an enormous backlog of artifacts still waiting
to be cataloged. To tackle that obstacle, GLAM used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to
build an enhanced image recognition system that would help accelerate the process
of cataloging artifacts."
"The Gardens and Museums IT team used Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service
that provides developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and
deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. Powered by Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, the models were trained and deployed at low cost to
automatically catalog the extensive coin collection of the Ashmolean Museum\
u2014which is the United Kingdom\u2019s first public museum and the world\u2019s
first university museum. On AWS, the image recognition system identifies and
catalogs coins in a fraction of the time it would take human volunteers to complete
the same task."
"Exterior of the Ashmolean Museum."
"kr_quotemark"
"I thought this project would be complex and time consuming, but using AWS made it
easy.\u201d"
"Anjanesh Babu"
"Systems Architect and Network Manager, Gardens and Museums IT, University of
Oxford's Gardens, Libraries & Museums"
"Updating Infrastructure and Creating an ML-Based Cataloging System on AWS"
"GLAM comprises four museums\u2014the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, the
Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the
History of Science Museum\u2014as well as the Bodleian Libraries and the Oxford
Botanic Garden & Harcourt Arboretum. In 2019, GLAM saw 900,000 visitors to its
digital collections. Its 21 million objects include live specimens and plants,
historical artifacts, and even images of objects that were damaged, lost, or
returned to collectors. \u201cFor many years, the museums were not overly active at
investing in and managing the information technology infrastructure that underpins
all our digital services,\u201d says Anjanesh Babu, systems architect and network
manager at Gardens and Museums IT. \u201cAfter years of underinvestment in outdated
infrastructure, the University of Oxford brought together a strategic focus on
digital transformation through the GLAM Digital program.\u201d As part of this
program, the Digital Estate Improvement project was the foundational part to
deliver root and branch improvements to the infrastructure to make it fit to meet
the digital aspirations laid out in the objectives. In 2017, the project uploaded
60 TB of digital records to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object
storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance."
"UFE Mongolia Goes Online in 10 Days with AWS"
"2020"
"UFE-Mongolia_Customer-Reference_Image"
"kr_quotemark"
"The University had years and years of content. The challenge was how to move it to
the new system. Using AWS, it took us only three days.\u201d"
"Ankhtuya Dorisuren"
"Vice President, UFE"
"Founded in 1924, the University of Finance and Economics (UFE) is one of the
oldest educational institutions in Mongolia.It has over 6,000 students and more
than 300 employees and has successfully been running some online courses using on-
premises technology since 2015. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, UFE
used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to move all teaching online in less than two weeks,
enabling students to continue their studies remotely."
"On-Premises Infrastructure Not Up to the Job"
"At the beginning of 2020, UFE was using a local data center with two local
servers. But when more than 400 students tried to access it at once, the system was
overloaded, resulting in the entire learning management system going offline. The
local power supply was unreliable and the server would need to be restarted
manually after every power outage. Ankhtuya Dorisuren, UFE vice president,
explains: \u201cThis made it really difficult for students taking courses who lived
in the countryside and needed to access resources and teaching remotely.\u201d "
"In late January, the government of Mongolia announced a nationwide lockdown with
strict quarantine measures. All educational institutions closed within the space of
a week and overseas students were recalled home. This presented UFE with a problem:
how to continue providing all students with top-quality teaching while complying
with the lockdown restrictions. The speed of implementation was critical, as was
the need for an accessible and reliable system. UFE decided to transfer its entire
online learning management system to AWS cloud-based infrastructure\u2014and did so
within just 10-days."
"Uchi.ru Takes Lockdown Schoolchildren Online with AWS"
"2021"
"Uchi.ru became a first responder for education, keeping students learning, when
COVID-19 hit. The company provides school-age learning services around the world,
including Asia, Canada, Latin America, Russia, South Africa, and the USA.
Originally designed for use in the classroom and for extracurricular self-
education, its services employ an engaging, gamified approach to enhance
education."
"When the pandemic took hold, schools were shut down and the company found itself
having to provide remote learning for a much larger student audience. It rapidly
introduced new free services for schools, children, and teachers, providing large-
scale informational, methodological support for its school communities."
"The company soon found that its co-located servers were unable to cope with a
massive increase in usage, with more than 240,000 users now on the site at once,
compared to around 60,000 previously."
"Uchi.ru turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the urgent migration needed to
scale and meet the demand\u2014a migration that was achieved successfully and
quickly."
"Uchi-customer-references"
"kr_quotemark"
"The migration took three days. It wasn\u2019t business as usual and we were
outside our comfort zone, but it turned out to be fast, smooth, and practically
flawless in execution.\u201d"
"Alexey Vakhov"
"Chief Technical Officer, Uchi.ru"
"Turning to the Cloud to Cope with Overnight Demand"
"As the sector\u2019s largest educational technology provider, Uchi.ru had some
350,000 Russian speakers access its classroom services at least once a day at the
beginning of 2020. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, all schools closed with
little notice."
"The Uchi.ru team responded rapidly, introducing new distance-learning tools and
services to support students and teachers. They found extremely high demand for
distance learning and as a result, Uchi.ru was on the front line of education
provision, no longer an adjunct but of primary importance to the whole school-age
education system."
"Pomelo Fashion Enhances Shoppers\u2019 Experience, Increases Revenue Using Amazon
Personalize"
"2021"
"Pomelo Fashion, a global fashion e-commerce service based in Southeast Asia, had
been displaying items on its website in much the same way since it was founded in
2013. The setup had grown stale, not to mention that the algorithm for displaying
the items relied on old data streams with limited inputs and spotty accuracy. So as
a fast-growing, innovative startup, Pomelo Fashion set out to create personalized
customer experiences that would improve the discoverability of new items and
increase revenue\u2014and it needed a solution that would do so at scale. "
"Pomelo Fashion turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and used Amazon Personalize,
which enables developers to build applications with the same machine learning (ML)
technology used by Amazon.com for real-time personalized recommendations. By using
Amazon Personalize\u2014and the services of AWS Advanced Technology Partners
Segment and Braze\u2014to build fresh sorting and categorizing features, Pomelo
Fashion created a unique, personalized shopping experience that boosts customer
engagement and more efficiently converts it into sales."
"Smiling attractive young african woman"
"kr_quotemark"
"When you think of e-commerce, you think of AWS. New services are always coming out
on AWS, and support is very good.\u201d"
"Shane Leese"
"Business Intelligence Director, Pomelo Fashion"
"Updating a Years-Old Algorithm Using Amazon Personalize"
"Pomelo Fashion sells apparel online and in 18 retail locations throughout
Southeast Asia. Shipping to nearly two million customers in more than 50 countries,
the company currently employs 500 staff members across its corporate offices,
retail stores, and warehouses. Its gross revenue tripled from 2017 to 2018, doubled
from 2018 to 2019, and is on track to double in 2020 despite the overall global
economy being down\u2014in July 2020 alone, the company reported $7.5 million in
revenue. For years, Pomelo Fashion relied on an algorithm that ranked products on
category pages\u2014such as \u201cDresses,\u201d \u201cBlouses,\u201d and \
u201cPants & Bottoms\u201d\u2014based on page views and sales, blending the trends
of the past 30 days with lifetime behaviors, product price, and newest releases.
The rank was calculated daily and stored in a database, providing an identical
experience for every user by country. "
"Neiman Marcus Increases New Application Speed to Market by 50% on AWS, Improves
Digital Selling for Associates"
"2021"
"A luxury household name, Neiman Marcus has a reputation for delivering a first-
class, personalized customer service experience. To modernize and enhance that
experience, the company wanted to develop Connect, an omnichannel digital selling
application that would empower associates to view rich, personalized customer
information with the goal of making each customer interaction unforgettable. When
the COVID-19 pandemic forced many retail stores to close, the company\u2019s sales
moved exclusively online. To continue providing the hallmark experience that had
always attracted customers, Neiman Marcus needed to launch Connect quickly to
enable associates to perform digital selling. "
"Choosing a serverless architecture with mobile development solutions on Amazon Web
Services (AWS) enabled the development team to launch the app much faster than in
the 4 months it had originally planned. \u201cUsing AWS cloud-native and serverless
technologies, we increased our speed to market by at least 50 percent and were able
to accelerate the launch of Connect,\u201d says Sriram Vaidyanathan, senior
director of omni engineering at Neiman Marcus. This approach also greatly reduced
app-building costs and provided developers with more agility for the development
and rapid deployment of updates. The app elastically scales to support traffic at
any volume for greater cost efficiency, and it has increased"
"associate productivity."
"Female sales associate peruses clothing rack. "
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS Amplify on a serverless architecture cost us 90 percent less than if we
had built the app using a more traditional method. This is a huge win for us.\
u201d"
"Hemanth Jayaraman"
"Senior Director of Cloud Engineering, Neiman Marcus"
"Empowering Associates to Elevate the Customer Experience"
"Neiman Marcus is the flagship brand of the Neiman Marcus Group, a luxury retail
organization founded in 1907 and generating $2.6 billion in annual revenue from its
subsidiaries. Before Neiman Marcus developed Connect, associates were using an
assortment of tools and technologies to provide customer service. Each solution
provided a"
"different piece of information an associate needed to generate a sale. Some of
these solutions were outdated, and all of them were creating friction. As a result,
they were increasing sell times and decreasing associate productivity."
"AWS for Industries"
"AWS is How: HelloFresh Delivers a Personalized Experience to Millions of Customers
Around the World"
"by Ed Jimenez | on 21 MAY 2021 | in Amazon EMR, Amazon Simple Storage Services
(S3), Industries, Retail | Permalink | Comments | Share"
"Mealtimes are important sources of connection, comfort, and self-care. And though
we all have different lifestyles and preferences, we tend to crave similar
qualities when it comes to food: variety, novelty, nutrition, convenience, and
great taste. In essence, great food experiences are personal experiences that offer
plenty of choice and flexibility."
"HelloFreshEnter HelloFresh, the most popular meal kit in the world. HelloFresh
provides fresh, healthy, affordable ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes that are
delivered straight to your door. The company also operates a lean and innovative
supply chain designed to eliminate food waste, reduce carbon emissions, optimize
packaging, and favor local ingredient sourcing. With operations in 14 countries,
HelloFresh delivered more than 600 million meals to 5.3 million active customers
last year, providing organized, preportioned meal kits tailored to serve different
household sizes, schedules, and tastes. The HelloFresh approach to meeting diverse
needs, creating new menu options, and providing convenient delivery to each home it
serves depends on two crucial ingredients: maintaining a deep understanding of its
customers and staying agile across every aspect of its business, including product
development, production, and distribution."
"This is why HelloFresh uses Amazon Web Services (AWS). With AWS, HelloFresh gets a
reliable, global cloud infrastructure that easily scales to support the company\
u2019s growth around the world. With the help of AWS consultation and expertise,
HelloFresh has modernized its data capabilities, moving from its legacy database to
a data lake where it can centralize storage of both structured and unstructured
data. This makes it easier for HelloFresh to bring together information from
multiple data sources and use analytics tools to gather insights that it can use to
improve its services and create new offerings for customers. Using AWS, HelloFresh
maintains a closer connection to changing customer preferences and the flexibility
to quickly adapt its meal offerings and delivery services."
"HelloFresh runs much of its data management on Amazon Simple Storage Service
(Amazon S3), a service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance. It also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon
RDS) for automating time-consuming administration tasks related to database
management, such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.
Also important to HelloFresh data management is Amazon EMR, a big data platform
that makes it easier to process vast amounts of data using open source tools."
"See how HelloFresh is using AWS to deliver personalized customer experiences in
the new \u201cAWS Is How\u201d campaign. Learn how retail companies can use AWS to
build solutions that enhance customer experiences and deliver insights that improve
operations."
"BigBasket Grows Bigger with 400,000 Daily Orders on AWS"
"2021"
"Traffic Spikes Sixfold during Lockdown"
"The online grocery market in India is competitive and value-driven, with some 20
companies vying for shoppers in a market that\u2019s expected to hit $10.5 billion
by 2023. The central government\u2019s development of smart cities includes
infrastructure to support the growth of ecommerce, and many large companies are
making plays to get in on the action."
"BigBasket, India\u2019s largest online grocery, has been in business since 2011.
Customer retention is at the heart of its strategy, as well as a hyper-local
approach to inventory. BigBasket is available in 21 cities and runs its
infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The business had been
growing 20\u201330 percent each year, but when COVID-19 struck and India went into
lockdown, BigBasket faced unprecedented demand. Daily traffic was suddenly six
times higher than pre\u2013COVID-19 peaks."
"Big Basket"
"kr_quotemark"
"With AWS, we have all the pieces of the puzzle to smoothly run a large ecommerce
architecture."
"Rakshit Daga"
"Chief Technology Officer, BigBasket"
" "
"Microservices and Containers Boost Efficiency"
"BigBasket subscribes to AWS Enterprise Support and immediately consulted with the
AWS team for advice on scaling its architecture efficiently. \u201cAWS Enterprise
Support has been our go-to destination for all queries when we\u2019re building
something new or maintaining and enhancing existing functions,\u201d says Rakshit
Daga, chief technology officer at BigBasket. \u201cGiven the breadth of AWS
solutions we use, we have questions on all kinds of topics, and Enterprise Support
connects us to the right person quickly.\u201d"
"The company had already begun shifting to asynchronous work queues in 2018,
isolating workloads into containers and breaking up its monolithic architecture.
However, the onset of the 2020 lockdown shifted this process into high gear. By
mid-2020, the company was fully containerized with 60 microservices running on
Kubernetes."
"Gourmeat Boosts Efficiency and Productivity by 40% on Amazon Lightsail"
"2021"
"Gourmeat, a meat boutique founded in Uruguay and with US operations in Miami,
Florida, was using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to manage isolated inventories
manually, but this time-consuming process was hampering its growth. "
"Looking to modernize its data solution, Gourmeat turned to Amazon Web Services
(AWS) and AWS Select Consulting Partner Nub8. Within weeks, the company had a new
inventory management system hosted on Amazon Lightsail, a simple-to-use virtual
private server that offers everything needed to build a web application. Gourmeat\
u2019s integrated cloud-based inventory application reduces time spent on inventory
management, maintains reliable and secure data, and enables key decision makers in
the company to have simultaneous data access."
"Gourmeat storefront"
"kr_quotemark"
"Once we started using the solution built on Amazon Lightsail, inventory management
and report creation went from approximately 4 hours a week to less than 20
minutes.\u201d"
"Lucia Albanell"
"CEO and cofounder, Gourmeat"
"Moving to Integrated Inventory Management"
"Founded in 2013, Gourmeat sells hormone- and antibiotic-free meat online and in
stores in Uruguay and Miami. Before turning to AWS and Nub8, Gourmeat managed
inventory through manual reports from its vendors. \u201cThe old system used
isolated applications, and it didn\u2019t enable simultaneous access for decision
makers across the company,\u201d says Lucia Albanell, CEO and cofounder of
Gourmeat. \u201cThis resulted in inefficiencies and low confidence in data
quality.\u201d "
"Pearson Boosts Security and Productivity Using Amazon Elasticsearch Service"
"2020"
"Global educational media company Pearson needed a more efficient way to analyze
and gain insights from its log data. With a number of teams in various locations
using Elasticsearch\u2014the popular open-source tool for search and log analytics\
u2014Pearson found that keeping track of log data and managing updates led to high
operating costs. Faced with this, as well as increasingly complex security log
management and analysis, the company found a solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Pearson quickly saw improvements by migrating from its self-managed open-source
Elasticsearch architecture to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, a fully managed service
that makes it easy to deploy, secure, and run Elasticsearch cost effectively at
scale. Rather than spending considerable time and resources on managing the
Elasticsearch clusters on its own, Pearson used the managed Amazon Elasticsearch
Service as part of its initiative to modernize its products. "
"Shot of two young women using a laptop together in a college library"
"kr_quotemark"
"As we migrate to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, we can start to focus on what\
u2019s necessary from a security perspective. We can bring in different skill sets
and focus on what\u2019s more important to the company rather than just maintaining
standard hardware or infrastructure.\u201d "
"Muthu Meyyappan"
"VP of Security Engineering and Product Security Officer, Pearson"
"Meeting the Needs of the Modern World"
"As one of the largest and oldest educational companies in the world, Pearson
operates in 70 different countries. The company provides a wide variety of
educational content and assessments and other services, which are often specialized
for different target audiences. As the company moved toward digitization in the
cloud, it began to use AWS services. At first, Pearson used Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2)\u2014a web service that provides secure, resizable compute
capacity in the cloud\u2014to power its self-managed open-source Elasticsearch. But
the company found that a self-managed approach posed several challenges. \u201cOne
of the major issues we had was with the security portion of the fine-grained access
control\u2014we weren\u2019t able to work through that,\u201d says Muthu Meyyappan,
vice president of security engineering and product security officer for Pearson. \
u201cAnother challenge was maintaining the upgrades and the usual service
management below the line, which consumed the effort of a full-time engineer to
maintain the platform.\u201d"
"In order to iron out its access control to log data and reduce the amount of time
spent on updates, Pearson turned to Amazon Elasticsearch Service. \u201cWhen we
were updating the open-source Elasticsearch, it took time to make sure we didn\
u2019t miss any data,\u201d says Meyyappan. \u201cWe were looking to have someone
else take that accountability. If there is data lost, for example, Amazon
Elasticsearch Service enables us to go back 14 days and get the index back.
Features like that encouraged us to migrate to the managed service.\u201d"
"TestWe Turns to AWS to Drive Global Expansion"
"2021"
"In 2014, colleagues Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier and Charles Zhu came across a study
that indicated 95 percent of European students owned laptops. However, educational
institutions continued to rely on paper-based exams. That\u2019s when R\u00e9gnier
and Zhu decided to launch TestWe, a platform for administering in-class and remote
computer-based assessments. \u201cStudents were using their devices for taking
notes, research, and sending emails,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cIt only made
sense for them to use their laptops to take exams as well.\u201d"
"The TestWe solution gives students the ability to take exams securely, in the
classroom or at home. Educational institutions can administer digital exams while
eliminating the possibility of students getting help from online resources or other
people since the tests are taken offline and recorded by a camera. The TestWe exam
process runs in the cloud and can be fully integrated into a school\u2019s learning
management system. Additionally, the tests can run directly on any type of student
devices."
"Today, TestWe is available in seven different languages and used in countries
throughout Western Europe as well as in North and South America. Every year, TestWe
helps teachers create millions of test questions."
"Student studies outside"
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS services enhances our credibility. Partners and customers know our tests
will run reliably and scale easily.\u201d"
"Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier"
"Cofounder and Chief Commercial Officer, TestWe"
"Global Expansion Requires Greater Firepower in the Cloud"
"In the early years of the company, TestWe relied on a regional cloud-platform
provider to host its applications. The company then began to expand to markets
throughout Western Europe and into Canada and South America. R\u00e9gnier and Zhu
soon realized they needed to migrate their testing applications to a provider with
global capabilities\u2014one that could deliver applications from local regional
data centers. \u201cWe wanted to ensure students, teachers, and administrators
continued to experience fast performance when interacting with the tests, no matter
where they are located,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cAnd with a larger customer
base, we needed to make sure our cloud infrastructure could handle spikes in
activity.\u201d"
"University of Oxford Introduces a Sector-Leading Image Recognition ML Prototype to
Augment Digitization in Numismatics"
"2021"
"The University of Oxford houses 21 million objects in the collections of its
Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM)\u2014artifacts and specimens that are among the
world\u2019s most significant. One aspect of GLAM\u2019s mission is to preserve
these assets and make them accessible to the world for education and research.
However, the organization has only enough space to display about 10 percent of its
holdings at a time, and there\u2019s an enormous backlog of artifacts still waiting
to be cataloged. To tackle that obstacle, GLAM used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to
build an enhanced image recognition system that would help accelerate the process
of cataloging artifacts."
"The Gardens and Museums IT team used Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service
that provides developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and
deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. Powered by Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, the models were trained and deployed at low cost to
automatically catalog the extensive coin collection of the Ashmolean Museum\
u2014which is the United Kingdom\u2019s first public museum and the world\u2019s
first university museum. On AWS, the image recognition system identifies and
catalogs coins in a fraction of the time it would take human volunteers to complete
the same task."
"Exterior of the Ashmolean Museum."
"kr_quotemark"
"I thought this project would be complex and time consuming, but using AWS made it
easy.\u201d"
"Anjanesh Babu"
"Systems Architect and Network Manager, Gardens and Museums IT, University of
Oxford's Gardens, Libraries & Museums"
"Updating Infrastructure and Creating an ML-Based Cataloging System on AWS"
"GLAM comprises four museums\u2014the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, the
Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the
History of Science Museum\u2014as well as the Bodleian Libraries and the Oxford
Botanic Garden & Harcourt Arboretum. In 2019, GLAM saw 900,000 visitors to its
digital collections. Its 21 million objects include live specimens and plants,
historical artifacts, and even images of objects that were damaged, lost, or
returned to collectors. \u201cFor many years, the museums were not overly active at
investing in and managing the information technology infrastructure that underpins
all our digital services,\u201d says Anjanesh Babu, systems architect and network
manager at Gardens and Museums IT. \u201cAfter years of underinvestment in outdated
infrastructure, the University of Oxford brought together a strategic focus on
digital transformation through the GLAM Digital program.\u201d As part of this
program, the Digital Estate Improvement project was the foundational part to
deliver root and branch improvements to the infrastructure to make it fit to meet
the digital aspirations laid out in the objectives. In 2017, the project uploaded
60 TB of digital records to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object
storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance."
"UFE Mongolia Goes Online in 10 Days with AWS"
"2020"
"UFE-Mongolia_Customer-Reference_Image"
"kr_quotemark"
"The University had years and years of content. The challenge was how to move it to
the new system. Using AWS, it took us only three days.\u201d"
"Ankhtuya Dorisuren"
"Vice President, UFE"
"Founded in 1924, the University of Finance and Economics (UFE) is one of the
oldest educational institutions in Mongolia.It has over 6,000 students and more
than 300 employees and has successfully been running some online courses using on-
premises technology since 2015. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, UFE
used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to move all teaching online in less than two weeks,
enabling students to continue their studies remotely."
"On-Premises Infrastructure Not Up to the Job"
"At the beginning of 2020, UFE was using a local data center with two local
servers. But when more than 400 students tried to access it at once, the system was
overloaded, resulting in the entire learning management system going offline. The
local power supply was unreliable and the server would need to be restarted
manually after every power outage. Ankhtuya Dorisuren, UFE vice president,
explains: \u201cThis made it really difficult for students taking courses who lived
in the countryside and needed to access resources and teaching remotely.\u201d "
"In late January, the government of Mongolia announced a nationwide lockdown with
strict quarantine measures. All educational institutions closed within the space of
a week and overseas students were recalled home. This presented UFE with a problem:
how to continue providing all students with top-quality teaching while complying
with the lockdown restrictions. The speed of implementation was critical, as was
the need for an accessible and reliable system. UFE decided to transfer its entire
online learning management system to AWS cloud-based infrastructure\u2014and did so
within just 10-days."
"Uchi.ru Takes Lockdown Schoolchildren Online with AWS"
"2021"
"Uchi.ru became a first responder for education, keeping students learning, when
COVID-19 hit. The company provides school-age learning services around the world,
including Asia, Canada, Latin America, Russia, South Africa, and the USA.
Originally designed for use in the classroom and for extracurricular self-
education, its services employ an engaging, gamified approach to enhance
education."
"When the pandemic took hold, schools were shut down and the company found itself
having to provide remote learning for a much larger student audience. It rapidly
introduced new free services for schools, children, and teachers, providing large-
scale informational, methodological support for its school communities."
"The company soon found that its co-located servers were unable to cope with a
massive increase in usage, with more than 240,000 users now on the site at once,
compared to around 60,000 previously."
"Uchi.ru turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the urgent migration needed to
scale and meet the demand\u2014a migration that was achieved successfully and
quickly."
"Uchi-customer-references"
"kr_quotemark"
"The migration took three days. It wasn\u2019t business as usual and we were
outside our comfort zone, but it turned out to be fast, smooth, and practically
flawless in execution.\u201d"
"Alexey Vakhov"
"Chief Technical Officer, Uchi.ru"
"Turning to the Cloud to Cope with Overnight Demand"
"As the sector\u2019s largest educational technology provider, Uchi.ru had some
350,000 Russian speakers access its classroom services at least once a day at the
beginning of 2020. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, all schools closed with
little notice."
"The Uchi.ru team responded rapidly, introducing new distance-learning tools and
services to support students and teachers. They found extremely high demand for
distance learning and as a result, Uchi.ru was on the front line of education
provision, no longer an adjunct but of primary importance to the whole school-age
education system."
"Pomelo Fashion Enhances Shoppers\u2019 Experience, Increases Revenue Using Amazon
Personalize"
"2021"
"Pomelo Fashion, a global fashion e-commerce service based in Southeast Asia, had
been displaying items on its website in much the same way since it was founded in
2013. The setup had grown stale, not to mention that the algorithm for displaying
the items relied on old data streams with limited inputs and spotty accuracy. So as
a fast-growing, innovative startup, Pomelo Fashion set out to create personalized
customer experiences that would improve the discoverability of new items and
increase revenue\u2014and it needed a solution that would do so at scale. "
"Pomelo Fashion turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and used Amazon Personalize,
which enables developers to build applications with the same machine learning (ML)
technology used by Amazon.com for real-time personalized recommendations. By using
Amazon Personalize\u2014and the services of AWS Advanced Technology Partners
Segment and Braze\u2014to build fresh sorting and categorizing features, Pomelo
Fashion created a unique, personalized shopping experience that boosts customer
engagement and more efficiently converts it into sales."
"Smiling attractive young african woman"
"kr_quotemark"
"When you think of e-commerce, you think of AWS. New services are always coming out
on AWS, and support is very good.\u201d"
"Shane Leese"
"Business Intelligence Director, Pomelo Fashion"
"Updating a Years-Old Algorithm Using Amazon Personalize"
"Pomelo Fashion sells apparel online and in 18 retail locations throughout
Southeast Asia. Shipping to nearly two million customers in more than 50 countries,
the company currently employs 500 staff members across its corporate offices,
retail stores, and warehouses. Its gross revenue tripled from 2017 to 2018, doubled
from 2018 to 2019, and is on track to double in 2020 despite the overall global
economy being down\u2014in July 2020 alone, the company reported $7.5 million in
revenue. For years, Pomelo Fashion relied on an algorithm that ranked products on
category pages\u2014such as \u201cDresses,\u201d \u201cBlouses,\u201d and \
u201cPants & Bottoms\u201d\u2014based on page views and sales, blending the trends
of the past 30 days with lifetime behaviors, product price, and newest releases.
The rank was calculated daily and stored in a database, providing an identical
experience for every user by country. "
"Neiman Marcus Increases New Application Speed to Market by 50% on AWS, Improves
Digital Selling for Associates"
"2021"
"A luxury household name, Neiman Marcus has a reputation for delivering a first-
class, personalized customer service experience. To modernize and enhance that
experience, the company wanted to develop Connect, an omnichannel digital selling
application that would empower associates to view rich, personalized customer
information with the goal of making each customer interaction unforgettable. When
the COVID-19 pandemic forced many retail stores to close, the company\u2019s sales
moved exclusively online. To continue providing the hallmark experience that had
always attracted customers, Neiman Marcus needed to launch Connect quickly to
enable associates to perform digital selling. "
"Choosing a serverless architecture with mobile development solutions on Amazon Web
Services (AWS) enabled the development team to launch the app much faster than in
the 4 months it had originally planned. \u201cUsing AWS cloud-native and serverless
technologies, we increased our speed to market by at least 50 percent and were able
to accelerate the launch of Connect,\u201d says Sriram Vaidyanathan, senior
director of omni engineering at Neiman Marcus. This approach also greatly reduced
app-building costs and provided developers with more agility for the development
and rapid deployment of updates. The app elastically scales to support traffic at
any volume for greater cost efficiency, and it has increased"
"associate productivity."
"Female sales associate peruses clothing rack. "
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS Amplify on a serverless architecture cost us 90 percent less than if we
had built the app using a more traditional method. This is a huge win for us.\
u201d"
"Hemanth Jayaraman"
"Senior Director of Cloud Engineering, Neiman Marcus"
"Empowering Associates to Elevate the Customer Experience"
"Neiman Marcus is the flagship brand of the Neiman Marcus Group, a luxury retail
organization founded in 1907 and generating $2.6 billion in annual revenue from its
subsidiaries. Before Neiman Marcus developed Connect, associates were using an
assortment of tools and technologies to provide customer service. Each solution
provided a"
"different piece of information an associate needed to generate a sale. Some of
these solutions were outdated, and all of them were creating friction. As a result,
they were increasing sell times and decreasing associate productivity."
"AWS for Industries"
"AWS is How: HelloFresh Delivers a Personalized Experience to Millions of Customers
Around the World"
"by Ed Jimenez | on 21 MAY 2021 | in Amazon EMR, Amazon Simple Storage Services
(S3), Industries, Retail | Permalink | Comments | Share"
"Mealtimes are important sources of connection, comfort, and self-care. And though
we all have different lifestyles and preferences, we tend to crave similar
qualities when it comes to food: variety, novelty, nutrition, convenience, and
great taste. In essence, great food experiences are personal experiences that offer
plenty of choice and flexibility."
"HelloFreshEnter HelloFresh, the most popular meal kit in the world. HelloFresh
provides fresh, healthy, affordable ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes that are
delivered straight to your door. The company also operates a lean and innovative
supply chain designed to eliminate food waste, reduce carbon emissions, optimize
packaging, and favor local ingredient sourcing. With operations in 14 countries,
HelloFresh delivered more than 600 million meals to 5.3 million active customers
last year, providing organized, preportioned meal kits tailored to serve different
household sizes, schedules, and tastes. The HelloFresh approach to meeting diverse
needs, creating new menu options, and providing convenient delivery to each home it
serves depends on two crucial ingredients: maintaining a deep understanding of its
customers and staying agile across every aspect of its business, including product
development, production, and distribution."
"This is why HelloFresh uses Amazon Web Services (AWS). With AWS, HelloFresh gets a
reliable, global cloud infrastructure that easily scales to support the company\
u2019s growth around the world. With the help of AWS consultation and expertise,
HelloFresh has modernized its data capabilities, moving from its legacy database to
a data lake where it can centralize storage of both structured and unstructured
data. This makes it easier for HelloFresh to bring together information from
multiple data sources and use analytics tools to gather insights that it can use to
improve its services and create new offerings for customers. Using AWS, HelloFresh
maintains a closer connection to changing customer preferences and the flexibility
to quickly adapt its meal offerings and delivery services."
"HelloFresh runs much of its data management on Amazon Simple Storage Service
(Amazon S3), a service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance. It also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon
RDS) for automating time-consuming administration tasks related to database
management, such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.
Also important to HelloFresh data management is Amazon EMR, a big data platform
that makes it easier to process vast amounts of data using open source tools."
"See how HelloFresh is using AWS to deliver personalized customer experiences in
the new \u201cAWS Is How\u201d campaign. Learn how retail companies can use AWS to
build solutions that enhance customer experiences and deliver insights that improve
operations."
"BigBasket Grows Bigger with 400,000 Daily Orders on AWS"
"2021"
"Traffic Spikes Sixfold during Lockdown"
"The online grocery market in India is competitive and value-driven, with some 20
companies vying for shoppers in a market that\u2019s expected to hit $10.5 billion
by 2023. The central government\u2019s development of smart cities includes
infrastructure to support the growth of ecommerce, and many large companies are
making plays to get in on the action."
"BigBasket, India\u2019s largest online grocery, has been in business since 2011.
Customer retention is at the heart of its strategy, as well as a hyper-local
approach to inventory. BigBasket is available in 21 cities and runs its
infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The business had been
growing 20\u201330 percent each year, but when COVID-19 struck and India went into
lockdown, BigBasket faced unprecedented demand. Daily traffic was suddenly six
times higher than pre\u2013COVID-19 peaks."
"Big Basket"
"kr_quotemark"
"With AWS, we have all the pieces of the puzzle to smoothly run a large ecommerce
architecture."
"Rakshit Daga"
"Chief Technology Officer, BigBasket"
" "
"Microservices and Containers Boost Efficiency"
"BigBasket subscribes to AWS Enterprise Support and immediately consulted with the
AWS team for advice on scaling its architecture efficiently. \u201cAWS Enterprise
Support has been our go-to destination for all queries when we\u2019re building
something new or maintaining and enhancing existing functions,\u201d says Rakshit
Daga, chief technology officer at BigBasket. \u201cGiven the breadth of AWS
solutions we use, we have questions on all kinds of topics, and Enterprise Support
connects us to the right person quickly.\u201d"
"The company had already begun shifting to asynchronous work queues in 2018,
isolating workloads into containers and breaking up its monolithic architecture.
However, the onset of the 2020 lockdown shifted this process into high gear. By
mid-2020, the company was fully containerized with 60 microservices running on
Kubernetes."
"Gourmeat Boosts Efficiency and Productivity by 40% on Amazon Lightsail"
"2021"
"Gourmeat, a meat boutique founded in Uruguay and with US operations in Miami,
Florida, was using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to manage isolated inventories
manually, but this time-consuming process was hampering its growth. "
"Looking to modernize its data solution, Gourmeat turned to Amazon Web Services
(AWS) and AWS Select Consulting Partner Nub8. Within weeks, the company had a new
inventory management system hosted on Amazon Lightsail, a simple-to-use virtual
private server that offers everything needed to build a web application. Gourmeat\
u2019s integrated cloud-based inventory application reduces time spent on inventory
management, maintains reliable and secure data, and enables key decision makers in
the company to have simultaneous data access."
"Gourmeat storefront"
"kr_quotemark"
"Once we started using the solution built on Amazon Lightsail, inventory management
and report creation went from approximately 4 hours a week to less than 20
minutes.\u201d"
"Lucia Albanell"
"CEO and cofounder, Gourmeat"
"Moving to Integrated Inventory Management"
"Founded in 2013, Gourmeat sells hormone- and antibiotic-free meat online and in
stores in Uruguay and Miami. Before turning to AWS and Nub8, Gourmeat managed
inventory through manual reports from its vendors. \u201cThe old system used
isolated applications, and it didn\u2019t enable simultaneous access for decision
makers across the company,\u201d says Lucia Albanell, CEO and cofounder of
Gourmeat. \u201cThis resulted in inefficiencies and low confidence in data
quality.\u201d "
"Pearson Boosts Security and Productivity Using Amazon Elasticsearch Service"
"2020"
"Global educational media company Pearson needed a more efficient way to analyze
and gain insights from its log data. With a number of teams in various locations
using Elasticsearch\u2014the popular open-source tool for search and log analytics\
u2014Pearson found that keeping track of log data and managing updates led to high
operating costs. Faced with this, as well as increasingly complex security log
management and analysis, the company found a solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Pearson quickly saw improvements by migrating from its self-managed open-source
Elasticsearch architecture to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, a fully managed service
that makes it easy to deploy, secure, and run Elasticsearch cost effectively at
scale. Rather than spending considerable time and resources on managing the
Elasticsearch clusters on its own, Pearson used the managed Amazon Elasticsearch
Service as part of its initiative to modernize its products. "
"Shot of two young women using a laptop together in a college library"
"kr_quotemark"
"As we migrate to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, we can start to focus on what\
u2019s necessary from a security perspective. We can bring in different skill sets
and focus on what\u2019s more important to the company rather than just maintaining
standard hardware or infrastructure.\u201d "
"Muthu Meyyappan"
"VP of Security Engineering and Product Security Officer, Pearson"
"Meeting the Needs of the Modern World"
"As one of the largest and oldest educational companies in the world, Pearson
operates in 70 different countries. The company provides a wide variety of
educational content and assessments and other services, which are often specialized
for different target audiences. As the company moved toward digitization in the
cloud, it began to use AWS services. At first, Pearson used Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2)\u2014a web service that provides secure, resizable compute
capacity in the cloud\u2014to power its self-managed open-source Elasticsearch. But
the company found that a self-managed approach posed several challenges. \u201cOne
of the major issues we had was with the security portion of the fine-grained access
control\u2014we weren\u2019t able to work through that,\u201d says Muthu Meyyappan,
vice president of security engineering and product security officer for Pearson. \
u201cAnother challenge was maintaining the upgrades and the usual service
management below the line, which consumed the effort of a full-time engineer to
maintain the platform.\u201d"
"In order to iron out its access control to log data and reduce the amount of time
spent on updates, Pearson turned to Amazon Elasticsearch Service. \u201cWhen we
were updating the open-source Elasticsearch, it took time to make sure we didn\
u2019t miss any data,\u201d says Meyyappan. \u201cWe were looking to have someone
else take that accountability. If there is data lost, for example, Amazon
Elasticsearch Service enables us to go back 14 days and get the index back.
Features like that encouraged us to migrate to the managed service.\u201d"
"TestWe Turns to AWS to Drive Global Expansion"
"2021"
"In 2014, colleagues Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier and Charles Zhu came across a study
that indicated 95 percent of European students owned laptops. However, educational
institutions continued to rely on paper-based exams. That\u2019s when R\u00e9gnier
and Zhu decided to launch TestWe, a platform for administering in-class and remote
computer-based assessments. \u201cStudents were using their devices for taking
notes, research, and sending emails,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cIt only made
sense for them to use their laptops to take exams as well.\u201d"
"The TestWe solution gives students the ability to take exams securely, in the
classroom or at home. Educational institutions can administer digital exams while
eliminating the possibility of students getting help from online resources or other
people since the tests are taken offline and recorded by a camera. The TestWe exam
process runs in the cloud and can be fully integrated into a school\u2019s learning
management system. Additionally, the tests can run directly on any type of student
devices."
"Today, TestWe is available in seven different languages and used in countries
throughout Western Europe as well as in North and South America. Every year, TestWe
helps teachers create millions of test questions."
"Student studies outside"
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS services enhances our credibility. Partners and customers know our tests
will run reliably and scale easily.\u201d"
"Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier"
"Cofounder and Chief Commercial Officer, TestWe"
"Global Expansion Requires Greater Firepower in the Cloud"
"In the early years of the company, TestWe relied on a regional cloud-platform
provider to host its applications. The company then began to expand to markets
throughout Western Europe and into Canada and South America. R\u00e9gnier and Zhu
soon realized they needed to migrate their testing applications to a provider with
global capabilities\u2014one that could deliver applications from local regional
data centers. \u201cWe wanted to ensure students, teachers, and administrators
continued to experience fast performance when interacting with the tests, no matter
where they are located,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cAnd with a larger customer
base, we needed to make sure our cloud infrastructure could handle spikes in
activity.\u201d"
"University of Oxford Introduces a Sector-Leading Image Recognition ML Prototype to
Augment Digitization in Numismatics"
"2021"
"The University of Oxford houses 21 million objects in the collections of its
Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM)\u2014artifacts and specimens that are among the
world\u2019s most significant. One aspect of GLAM\u2019s mission is to preserve
these assets and make them accessible to the world for education and research.
However, the organization has only enough space to display about 10 percent of its
holdings at a time, and there\u2019s an enormous backlog of artifacts still waiting
to be cataloged. To tackle that obstacle, GLAM used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to
build an enhanced image recognition system that would help accelerate the process
of cataloging artifacts."
"The Gardens and Museums IT team used Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service
that provides developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and
deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. Powered by Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, the models were trained and deployed at low cost to
automatically catalog the extensive coin collection of the Ashmolean Museum\
u2014which is the United Kingdom\u2019s first public museum and the world\u2019s
first university museum. On AWS, the image recognition system identifies and
catalogs coins in a fraction of the time it would take human volunteers to complete
the same task."
"Exterior of the Ashmolean Museum."
"kr_quotemark"
"I thought this project would be complex and time consuming, but using AWS made it
easy.\u201d"
"Anjanesh Babu"
"Systems Architect and Network Manager, Gardens and Museums IT, University of
Oxford's Gardens, Libraries & Museums"
"Updating Infrastructure and Creating an ML-Based Cataloging System on AWS"
"GLAM comprises four museums\u2014the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, the
Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the
History of Science Museum\u2014as well as the Bodleian Libraries and the Oxford
Botanic Garden & Harcourt Arboretum. In 2019, GLAM saw 900,000 visitors to its
digital collections. Its 21 million objects include live specimens and plants,
historical artifacts, and even images of objects that were damaged, lost, or
returned to collectors. \u201cFor many years, the museums were not overly active at
investing in and managing the information technology infrastructure that underpins
all our digital services,\u201d says Anjanesh Babu, systems architect and network
manager at Gardens and Museums IT. \u201cAfter years of underinvestment in outdated
infrastructure, the University of Oxford brought together a strategic focus on
digital transformation through the GLAM Digital program.\u201d As part of this
program, the Digital Estate Improvement project was the foundational part to
deliver root and branch improvements to the infrastructure to make it fit to meet
the digital aspirations laid out in the objectives. In 2017, the project uploaded
60 TB of digital records to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object
storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance."
"UFE Mongolia Goes Online in 10 Days with AWS"
"2020"
"UFE-Mongolia_Customer-Reference_Image"
"kr_quotemark"
"The University had years and years of content. The challenge was how to move it to
the new system. Using AWS, it took us only three days.\u201d"
"Ankhtuya Dorisuren"
"Vice President, UFE"
"Founded in 1924, the University of Finance and Economics (UFE) is one of the
oldest educational institutions in Mongolia.It has over 6,000 students and more
than 300 employees and has successfully been running some online courses using on-
premises technology since 2015. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, UFE
used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to move all teaching online in less than two weeks,
enabling students to continue their studies remotely."
"On-Premises Infrastructure Not Up to the Job"
"At the beginning of 2020, UFE was using a local data center with two local
servers. But when more than 400 students tried to access it at once, the system was
overloaded, resulting in the entire learning management system going offline. The
local power supply was unreliable and the server would need to be restarted
manually after every power outage. Ankhtuya Dorisuren, UFE vice president,
explains: \u201cThis made it really difficult for students taking courses who lived
in the countryside and needed to access resources and teaching remotely.\u201d "
"In late January, the government of Mongolia announced a nationwide lockdown with
strict quarantine measures. All educational institutions closed within the space of
a week and overseas students were recalled home. This presented UFE with a problem:
how to continue providing all students with top-quality teaching while complying
with the lockdown restrictions. The speed of implementation was critical, as was
the need for an accessible and reliable system. UFE decided to transfer its entire
online learning management system to AWS cloud-based infrastructure\u2014and did so
within just 10-days."
"Uchi.ru Takes Lockdown Schoolchildren Online with AWS"
"2021"
"Uchi.ru became a first responder for education, keeping students learning, when
COVID-19 hit. The company provides school-age learning services around the world,
including Asia, Canada, Latin America, Russia, South Africa, and the USA.
Originally designed for use in the classroom and for extracurricular self-
education, its services employ an engaging, gamified approach to enhance
education."
"When the pandemic took hold, schools were shut down and the company found itself
having to provide remote learning for a much larger student audience. It rapidly
introduced new free services for schools, children, and teachers, providing large-
scale informational, methodological support for its school communities."
"The company soon found that its co-located servers were unable to cope with a
massive increase in usage, with more than 240,000 users now on the site at once,
compared to around 60,000 previously."
"Uchi.ru turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the urgent migration needed to
scale and meet the demand\u2014a migration that was achieved successfully and
quickly."
"Uchi-customer-references"
"kr_quotemark"
"The migration took three days. It wasn\u2019t business as usual and we were
outside our comfort zone, but it turned out to be fast, smooth, and practically
flawless in execution.\u201d"
"Alexey Vakhov"
"Chief Technical Officer, Uchi.ru"
"Turning to the Cloud to Cope with Overnight Demand"
"As the sector\u2019s largest educational technology provider, Uchi.ru had some
350,000 Russian speakers access its classroom services at least once a day at the
beginning of 2020. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, all schools closed with
little notice."
"The Uchi.ru team responded rapidly, introducing new distance-learning tools and
services to support students and teachers. They found extremely high demand for
distance learning and as a result, Uchi.ru was on the front line of education
provision, no longer an adjunct but of primary importance to the whole school-age
education system."
"Pomelo Fashion Enhances Shoppers\u2019 Experience, Increases Revenue Using Amazon
Personalize"
"2021"
"Pomelo Fashion, a global fashion e-commerce service based in Southeast Asia, had
been displaying items on its website in much the same way since it was founded in
2013. The setup had grown stale, not to mention that the algorithm for displaying
the items relied on old data streams with limited inputs and spotty accuracy. So as
a fast-growing, innovative startup, Pomelo Fashion set out to create personalized
customer experiences that would improve the discoverability of new items and
increase revenue\u2014and it needed a solution that would do so at scale. "
"Pomelo Fashion turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and used Amazon Personalize,
which enables developers to build applications with the same machine learning (ML)
technology used by Amazon.com for real-time personalized recommendations. By using
Amazon Personalize\u2014and the services of AWS Advanced Technology Partners
Segment and Braze\u2014to build fresh sorting and categorizing features, Pomelo
Fashion created a unique, personalized shopping experience that boosts customer
engagement and more efficiently converts it into sales."
"Smiling attractive young african woman"
"kr_quotemark"
"When you think of e-commerce, you think of AWS. New services are always coming out
on AWS, and support is very good.\u201d"
"Shane Leese"
"Business Intelligence Director, Pomelo Fashion"
"Updating a Years-Old Algorithm Using Amazon Personalize"
"Pomelo Fashion sells apparel online and in 18 retail locations throughout
Southeast Asia. Shipping to nearly two million customers in more than 50 countries,
the company currently employs 500 staff members across its corporate offices,
retail stores, and warehouses. Its gross revenue tripled from 2017 to 2018, doubled
from 2018 to 2019, and is on track to double in 2020 despite the overall global
economy being down\u2014in July 2020 alone, the company reported $7.5 million in
revenue. For years, Pomelo Fashion relied on an algorithm that ranked products on
category pages\u2014such as \u201cDresses,\u201d \u201cBlouses,\u201d and \
u201cPants & Bottoms\u201d\u2014based on page views and sales, blending the trends
of the past 30 days with lifetime behaviors, product price, and newest releases.
The rank was calculated daily and stored in a database, providing an identical
experience for every user by country. "
"Neiman Marcus Increases New Application Speed to Market by 50% on AWS, Improves
Digital Selling for Associates"
"2021"
"A luxury household name, Neiman Marcus has a reputation for delivering a first-
class, personalized customer service experience. To modernize and enhance that
experience, the company wanted to develop Connect, an omnichannel digital selling
application that would empower associates to view rich, personalized customer
information with the goal of making each customer interaction unforgettable. When
the COVID-19 pandemic forced many retail stores to close, the company\u2019s sales
moved exclusively online. To continue providing the hallmark experience that had
always attracted customers, Neiman Marcus needed to launch Connect quickly to
enable associates to perform digital selling. "
"Choosing a serverless architecture with mobile development solutions on Amazon Web
Services (AWS) enabled the development team to launch the app much faster than in
the 4 months it had originally planned. \u201cUsing AWS cloud-native and serverless
technologies, we increased our speed to market by at least 50 percent and were able
to accelerate the launch of Connect,\u201d says Sriram Vaidyanathan, senior
director of omni engineering at Neiman Marcus. This approach also greatly reduced
app-building costs and provided developers with more agility for the development
and rapid deployment of updates. The app elastically scales to support traffic at
any volume for greater cost efficiency, and it has increased"
"associate productivity."
"Female sales associate peruses clothing rack. "
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS Amplify on a serverless architecture cost us 90 percent less than if we
had built the app using a more traditional method. This is a huge win for us.\
u201d"
"Hemanth Jayaraman"
"Senior Director of Cloud Engineering, Neiman Marcus"
"Empowering Associates to Elevate the Customer Experience"
"Neiman Marcus is the flagship brand of the Neiman Marcus Group, a luxury retail
organization founded in 1907 and generating $2.6 billion in annual revenue from its
subsidiaries. Before Neiman Marcus developed Connect, associates were using an
assortment of tools and technologies to provide customer service. Each solution
provided a"
"different piece of information an associate needed to generate a sale. Some of
these solutions were outdated, and all of them were creating friction. As a result,
they were increasing sell times and decreasing associate productivity."
"AWS for Industries"
"AWS is How: HelloFresh Delivers a Personalized Experience to Millions of Customers
Around the World"
"by Ed Jimenez | on 21 MAY 2021 | in Amazon EMR, Amazon Simple Storage Services
(S3), Industries, Retail | Permalink | Comments | Share"
"Mealtimes are important sources of connection, comfort, and self-care. And though
we all have different lifestyles and preferences, we tend to crave similar
qualities when it comes to food: variety, novelty, nutrition, convenience, and
great taste. In essence, great food experiences are personal experiences that offer
plenty of choice and flexibility."
"HelloFreshEnter HelloFresh, the most popular meal kit in the world. HelloFresh
provides fresh, healthy, affordable ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes that are
delivered straight to your door. The company also operates a lean and innovative
supply chain designed to eliminate food waste, reduce carbon emissions, optimize
packaging, and favor local ingredient sourcing. With operations in 14 countries,
HelloFresh delivered more than 600 million meals to 5.3 million active customers
last year, providing organized, preportioned meal kits tailored to serve different
household sizes, schedules, and tastes. The HelloFresh approach to meeting diverse
needs, creating new menu options, and providing convenient delivery to each home it
serves depends on two crucial ingredients: maintaining a deep understanding of its
customers and staying agile across every aspect of its business, including product
development, production, and distribution."
"This is why HelloFresh uses Amazon Web Services (AWS). With AWS, HelloFresh gets a
reliable, global cloud infrastructure that easily scales to support the company\
u2019s growth around the world. With the help of AWS consultation and expertise,
HelloFresh has modernized its data capabilities, moving from its legacy database to
a data lake where it can centralize storage of both structured and unstructured
data. This makes it easier for HelloFresh to bring together information from
multiple data sources and use analytics tools to gather insights that it can use to
improve its services and create new offerings for customers. Using AWS, HelloFresh
maintains a closer connection to changing customer preferences and the flexibility
to quickly adapt its meal offerings and delivery services."
"HelloFresh runs much of its data management on Amazon Simple Storage Service
(Amazon S3), a service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance. It also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon
RDS) for automating time-consuming administration tasks related to database
management, such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.
Also important to HelloFresh data management is Amazon EMR, a big data platform
that makes it easier to process vast amounts of data using open source tools."
"See how HelloFresh is using AWS to deliver personalized customer experiences in
the new \u201cAWS Is How\u201d campaign. Learn how retail companies can use AWS to
build solutions that enhance customer experiences and deliver insights that improve
operations."
"BigBasket Grows Bigger with 400,000 Daily Orders on AWS"
"2021"
"Traffic Spikes Sixfold during Lockdown"
"The online grocery market in India is competitive and value-driven, with some 20
companies vying for shoppers in a market that\u2019s expected to hit $10.5 billion
by 2023. The central government\u2019s development of smart cities includes
infrastructure to support the growth of ecommerce, and many large companies are
making plays to get in on the action."
"BigBasket, India\u2019s largest online grocery, has been in business since 2011.
Customer retention is at the heart of its strategy, as well as a hyper-local
approach to inventory. BigBasket is available in 21 cities and runs its
infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The business had been
growing 20\u201330 percent each year, but when COVID-19 struck and India went into
lockdown, BigBasket faced unprecedented demand. Daily traffic was suddenly six
times higher than pre\u2013COVID-19 peaks."
"Big Basket"
"kr_quotemark"
"With AWS, we have all the pieces of the puzzle to smoothly run a large ecommerce
architecture."
"Rakshit Daga"
"Chief Technology Officer, BigBasket"
" "
"Microservices and Containers Boost Efficiency"
"BigBasket subscribes to AWS Enterprise Support and immediately consulted with the
AWS team for advice on scaling its architecture efficiently. \u201cAWS Enterprise
Support has been our go-to destination for all queries when we\u2019re building
something new or maintaining and enhancing existing functions,\u201d says Rakshit
Daga, chief technology officer at BigBasket. \u201cGiven the breadth of AWS
solutions we use, we have questions on all kinds of topics, and Enterprise Support
connects us to the right person quickly.\u201d"
"The company had already begun shifting to asynchronous work queues in 2018,
isolating workloads into containers and breaking up its monolithic architecture.
However, the onset of the 2020 lockdown shifted this process into high gear. By
mid-2020, the company was fully containerized with 60 microservices running on
Kubernetes."
"Gourmeat Boosts Efficiency and Productivity by 40% on Amazon Lightsail"
"2021"
"Gourmeat, a meat boutique founded in Uruguay and with US operations in Miami,
Florida, was using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to manage isolated inventories
manually, but this time-consuming process was hampering its growth. "
"Looking to modernize its data solution, Gourmeat turned to Amazon Web Services
(AWS) and AWS Select Consulting Partner Nub8. Within weeks, the company had a new
inventory management system hosted on Amazon Lightsail, a simple-to-use virtual
private server that offers everything needed to build a web application. Gourmeat\
u2019s integrated cloud-based inventory application reduces time spent on inventory
management, maintains reliable and secure data, and enables key decision makers in
the company to have simultaneous data access."
"Gourmeat storefront"
"kr_quotemark"
"Once we started using the solution built on Amazon Lightsail, inventory management
and report creation went from approximately 4 hours a week to less than 20
minutes.\u201d"
"Lucia Albanell"
"CEO and cofounder, Gourmeat"
"Moving to Integrated Inventory Management"
"Founded in 2013, Gourmeat sells hormone- and antibiotic-free meat online and in
stores in Uruguay and Miami. Before turning to AWS and Nub8, Gourmeat managed
inventory through manual reports from its vendors. \u201cThe old system used
isolated applications, and it didn\u2019t enable simultaneous access for decision
makers across the company,\u201d says Lucia Albanell, CEO and cofounder of
Gourmeat. \u201cThis resulted in inefficiencies and low confidence in data
quality.\u201d "
"Pearson Boosts Security and Productivity Using Amazon Elasticsearch Service"
"2020"
"Global educational media company Pearson needed a more efficient way to analyze
and gain insights from its log data. With a number of teams in various locations
using Elasticsearch\u2014the popular open-source tool for search and log analytics\
u2014Pearson found that keeping track of log data and managing updates led to high
operating costs. Faced with this, as well as increasingly complex security log
management and analysis, the company found a solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Pearson quickly saw improvements by migrating from its self-managed open-source
Elasticsearch architecture to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, a fully managed service
that makes it easy to deploy, secure, and run Elasticsearch cost effectively at
scale. Rather than spending considerable time and resources on managing the
Elasticsearch clusters on its own, Pearson used the managed Amazon Elasticsearch
Service as part of its initiative to modernize its products. "
"Shot of two young women using a laptop together in a college library"
"kr_quotemark"
"As we migrate to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, we can start to focus on what\
u2019s necessary from a security perspective. We can bring in different skill sets
and focus on what\u2019s more important to the company rather than just maintaining
standard hardware or infrastructure.\u201d "
"Muthu Meyyappan"
"VP of Security Engineering and Product Security Officer, Pearson"
"Meeting the Needs of the Modern World"
"As one of the largest and oldest educational companies in the world, Pearson
operates in 70 different countries. The company provides a wide variety of
educational content and assessments and other services, which are often specialized
for different target audiences. As the company moved toward digitization in the
cloud, it began to use AWS services. At first, Pearson used Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2)\u2014a web service that provides secure, resizable compute
capacity in the cloud\u2014to power its self-managed open-source Elasticsearch. But
the company found that a self-managed approach posed several challenges. \u201cOne
of the major issues we had was with the security portion of the fine-grained access
control\u2014we weren\u2019t able to work through that,\u201d says Muthu Meyyappan,
vice president of security engineering and product security officer for Pearson. \
u201cAnother challenge was maintaining the upgrades and the usual service
management below the line, which consumed the effort of a full-time engineer to
maintain the platform.\u201d"
"In order to iron out its access control to log data and reduce the amount of time
spent on updates, Pearson turned to Amazon Elasticsearch Service. \u201cWhen we
were updating the open-source Elasticsearch, it took time to make sure we didn\
u2019t miss any data,\u201d says Meyyappan. \u201cWe were looking to have someone
else take that accountability. If there is data lost, for example, Amazon
Elasticsearch Service enables us to go back 14 days and get the index back.
Features like that encouraged us to migrate to the managed service.\u201d"
"TestWe Turns to AWS to Drive Global Expansion"
"2021"
"In 2014, colleagues Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier and Charles Zhu came across a study
that indicated 95 percent of European students owned laptops. However, educational
institutions continued to rely on paper-based exams. That\u2019s when R\u00e9gnier
and Zhu decided to launch TestWe, a platform for administering in-class and remote
computer-based assessments. \u201cStudents were using their devices for taking
notes, research, and sending emails,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cIt only made
sense for them to use their laptops to take exams as well.\u201d"
"The TestWe solution gives students the ability to take exams securely, in the
classroom or at home. Educational institutions can administer digital exams while
eliminating the possibility of students getting help from online resources or other
people since the tests are taken offline and recorded by a camera. The TestWe exam
process runs in the cloud and can be fully integrated into a school\u2019s learning
management system. Additionally, the tests can run directly on any type of student
devices."
"Today, TestWe is available in seven different languages and used in countries
throughout Western Europe as well as in North and South America. Every year, TestWe
helps teachers create millions of test questions."
"Student studies outside"
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS services enhances our credibility. Partners and customers know our tests
will run reliably and scale easily.\u201d"
"Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier"
"Cofounder and Chief Commercial Officer, TestWe"
"Global Expansion Requires Greater Firepower in the Cloud"
"In the early years of the company, TestWe relied on a regional cloud-platform
provider to host its applications. The company then began to expand to markets
throughout Western Europe and into Canada and South America. R\u00e9gnier and Zhu
soon realized they needed to migrate their testing applications to a provider with
global capabilities\u2014one that could deliver applications from local regional
data centers. \u201cWe wanted to ensure students, teachers, and administrators
continued to experience fast performance when interacting with the tests, no matter
where they are located,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cAnd with a larger customer
base, we needed to make sure our cloud infrastructure could handle spikes in
activity.\u201d"
"University of Oxford Introduces a Sector-Leading Image Recognition ML Prototype to
Augment Digitization in Numismatics"
"2021"
"The University of Oxford houses 21 million objects in the collections of its
Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM)\u2014artifacts and specimens that are among the
world\u2019s most significant. One aspect of GLAM\u2019s mission is to preserve
these assets and make them accessible to the world for education and research.
However, the organization has only enough space to display about 10 percent of its
holdings at a time, and there\u2019s an enormous backlog of artifacts still waiting
to be cataloged. To tackle that obstacle, GLAM used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to
build an enhanced image recognition system that would help accelerate the process
of cataloging artifacts."
"The Gardens and Museums IT team used Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service
that provides developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and
deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. Powered by Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, the models were trained and deployed at low cost to
automatically catalog the extensive coin collection of the Ashmolean Museum\
u2014which is the United Kingdom\u2019s first public museum and the world\u2019s
first university museum. On AWS, the image recognition system identifies and
catalogs coins in a fraction of the time it would take human volunteers to complete
the same task."
"Exterior of the Ashmolean Museum."
"kr_quotemark"
"I thought this project would be complex and time consuming, but using AWS made it
easy.\u201d"
"Anjanesh Babu"
"Systems Architect and Network Manager, Gardens and Museums IT, University of
Oxford's Gardens, Libraries & Museums"
"Updating Infrastructure and Creating an ML-Based Cataloging System on AWS"
"GLAM comprises four museums\u2014the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, the
Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the
History of Science Museum\u2014as well as the Bodleian Libraries and the Oxford
Botanic Garden & Harcourt Arboretum. In 2019, GLAM saw 900,000 visitors to its
digital collections. Its 21 million objects include live specimens and plants,
historical artifacts, and even images of objects that were damaged, lost, or
returned to collectors. \u201cFor many years, the museums were not overly active at
investing in and managing the information technology infrastructure that underpins
all our digital services,\u201d says Anjanesh Babu, systems architect and network
manager at Gardens and Museums IT. \u201cAfter years of underinvestment in outdated
infrastructure, the University of Oxford brought together a strategic focus on
digital transformation through the GLAM Digital program.\u201d As part of this
program, the Digital Estate Improvement project was the foundational part to
deliver root and branch improvements to the infrastructure to make it fit to meet
the digital aspirations laid out in the objectives. In 2017, the project uploaded
60 TB of digital records to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object
storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance."
"UFE Mongolia Goes Online in 10 Days with AWS"
"2020"
"UFE-Mongolia_Customer-Reference_Image"
"kr_quotemark"
"The University had years and years of content. The challenge was how to move it to
the new system. Using AWS, it took us only three days.\u201d"
"Ankhtuya Dorisuren"
"Vice President, UFE"
"Founded in 1924, the University of Finance and Economics (UFE) is one of the
oldest educational institutions in Mongolia.It has over 6,000 students and more
than 300 employees and has successfully been running some online courses using on-
premises technology since 2015. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, UFE
used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to move all teaching online in less than two weeks,
enabling students to continue their studies remotely."
"On-Premises Infrastructure Not Up to the Job"
"At the beginning of 2020, UFE was using a local data center with two local
servers. But when more than 400 students tried to access it at once, the system was
overloaded, resulting in the entire learning management system going offline. The
local power supply was unreliable and the server would need to be restarted
manually after every power outage. Ankhtuya Dorisuren, UFE vice president,
explains: \u201cThis made it really difficult for students taking courses who lived
in the countryside and needed to access resources and teaching remotely.\u201d "
"In late January, the government of Mongolia announced a nationwide lockdown with
strict quarantine measures. All educational institutions closed within the space of
a week and overseas students were recalled home. This presented UFE with a problem:
how to continue providing all students with top-quality teaching while complying
with the lockdown restrictions. The speed of implementation was critical, as was
the need for an accessible and reliable system. UFE decided to transfer its entire
online learning management system to AWS cloud-based infrastructure\u2014and did so
within just 10-days."
"Uchi.ru Takes Lockdown Schoolchildren Online with AWS"
"2021"
"Uchi.ru became a first responder for education, keeping students learning, when
COVID-19 hit. The company provides school-age learning services around the world,
including Asia, Canada, Latin America, Russia, South Africa, and the USA.
Originally designed for use in the classroom and for extracurricular self-
education, its services employ an engaging, gamified approach to enhance
education."
"When the pandemic took hold, schools were shut down and the company found itself
having to provide remote learning for a much larger student audience. It rapidly
introduced new free services for schools, children, and teachers, providing large-
scale informational, methodological support for its school communities."
"The company soon found that its co-located servers were unable to cope with a
massive increase in usage, with more than 240,000 users now on the site at once,
compared to around 60,000 previously."
"Uchi.ru turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the urgent migration needed to
scale and meet the demand\u2014a migration that was achieved successfully and
quickly."
"Uchi-customer-references"
"kr_quotemark"
"The migration took three days. It wasn\u2019t business as usual and we were
outside our comfort zone, but it turned out to be fast, smooth, and practically
flawless in execution.\u201d"
"Alexey Vakhov"
"Chief Technical Officer, Uchi.ru"
"Turning to the Cloud to Cope with Overnight Demand"
"As the sector\u2019s largest educational technology provider, Uchi.ru had some
350,000 Russian speakers access its classroom services at least once a day at the
beginning of 2020. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, all schools closed with
little notice."
"The Uchi.ru team responded rapidly, introducing new distance-learning tools and
services to support students and teachers. They found extremely high demand for
distance learning and as a result, Uchi.ru was on the front line of education
provision, no longer an adjunct but of primary importance to the whole school-age
education system."
"Pomelo Fashion Enhances Shoppers\u2019 Experience, Increases Revenue Using Amazon
Personalize"
"2021"
"Pomelo Fashion, a global fashion e-commerce service based in Southeast Asia, had
been displaying items on its website in much the same way since it was founded in
2013. The setup had grown stale, not to mention that the algorithm for displaying
the items relied on old data streams with limited inputs and spotty accuracy. So as
a fast-growing, innovative startup, Pomelo Fashion set out to create personalized
customer experiences that would improve the discoverability of new items and
increase revenue\u2014and it needed a solution that would do so at scale. "
"Pomelo Fashion turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and used Amazon Personalize,
which enables developers to build applications with the same machine learning (ML)
technology used by Amazon.com for real-time personalized recommendations. By using
Amazon Personalize\u2014and the services of AWS Advanced Technology Partners
Segment and Braze\u2014to build fresh sorting and categorizing features, Pomelo
Fashion created a unique, personalized shopping experience that boosts customer
engagement and more efficiently converts it into sales."
"Smiling attractive young african woman"
"kr_quotemark"
"When you think of e-commerce, you think of AWS. New services are always coming out
on AWS, and support is very good.\u201d"
"Shane Leese"
"Business Intelligence Director, Pomelo Fashion"
"Updating a Years-Old Algorithm Using Amazon Personalize"
"Pomelo Fashion sells apparel online and in 18 retail locations throughout
Southeast Asia. Shipping to nearly two million customers in more than 50 countries,
the company currently employs 500 staff members across its corporate offices,
retail stores, and warehouses. Its gross revenue tripled from 2017 to 2018, doubled
from 2018 to 2019, and is on track to double in 2020 despite the overall global
economy being down\u2014in July 2020 alone, the company reported $7.5 million in
revenue. For years, Pomelo Fashion relied on an algorithm that ranked products on
category pages\u2014such as \u201cDresses,\u201d \u201cBlouses,\u201d and \
u201cPants & Bottoms\u201d\u2014based on page views and sales, blending the trends
of the past 30 days with lifetime behaviors, product price, and newest releases.
The rank was calculated daily and stored in a database, providing an identical
experience for every user by country. "
"Neiman Marcus Increases New Application Speed to Market by 50% on AWS, Improves
Digital Selling for Associates"
"2021"
"A luxury household name, Neiman Marcus has a reputation for delivering a first-
class, personalized customer service experience. To modernize and enhance that
experience, the company wanted to develop Connect, an omnichannel digital selling
application that would empower associates to view rich, personalized customer
information with the goal of making each customer interaction unforgettable. When
the COVID-19 pandemic forced many retail stores to close, the company\u2019s sales
moved exclusively online. To continue providing the hallmark experience that had
always attracted customers, Neiman Marcus needed to launch Connect quickly to
enable associates to perform digital selling. "
"Choosing a serverless architecture with mobile development solutions on Amazon Web
Services (AWS) enabled the development team to launch the app much faster than in
the 4 months it had originally planned. \u201cUsing AWS cloud-native and serverless
technologies, we increased our speed to market by at least 50 percent and were able
to accelerate the launch of Connect,\u201d says Sriram Vaidyanathan, senior
director of omni engineering at Neiman Marcus. This approach also greatly reduced
app-building costs and provided developers with more agility for the development
and rapid deployment of updates. The app elastically scales to support traffic at
any volume for greater cost efficiency, and it has increased"
"associate productivity."
"Female sales associate peruses clothing rack. "
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS Amplify on a serverless architecture cost us 90 percent less than if we
had built the app using a more traditional method. This is a huge win for us.\
u201d"
"Hemanth Jayaraman"
"Senior Director of Cloud Engineering, Neiman Marcus"
"Empowering Associates to Elevate the Customer Experience"
"Neiman Marcus is the flagship brand of the Neiman Marcus Group, a luxury retail
organization founded in 1907 and generating $2.6 billion in annual revenue from its
subsidiaries. Before Neiman Marcus developed Connect, associates were using an
assortment of tools and technologies to provide customer service. Each solution
provided a"
"different piece of information an associate needed to generate a sale. Some of
these solutions were outdated, and all of them were creating friction. As a result,
they were increasing sell times and decreasing associate productivity."
"AWS for Industries"
"AWS is How: HelloFresh Delivers a Personalized Experience to Millions of Customers
Around the World"
"by Ed Jimenez | on 21 MAY 2021 | in Amazon EMR, Amazon Simple Storage Services
(S3), Industries, Retail | Permalink | Comments | Share"
"Mealtimes are important sources of connection, comfort, and self-care. And though
we all have different lifestyles and preferences, we tend to crave similar
qualities when it comes to food: variety, novelty, nutrition, convenience, and
great taste. In essence, great food experiences are personal experiences that offer
plenty of choice and flexibility."
"HelloFreshEnter HelloFresh, the most popular meal kit in the world. HelloFresh
provides fresh, healthy, affordable ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes that are
delivered straight to your door. The company also operates a lean and innovative
supply chain designed to eliminate food waste, reduce carbon emissions, optimize
packaging, and favor local ingredient sourcing. With operations in 14 countries,
HelloFresh delivered more than 600 million meals to 5.3 million active customers
last year, providing organized, preportioned meal kits tailored to serve different
household sizes, schedules, and tastes. The HelloFresh approach to meeting diverse
needs, creating new menu options, and providing convenient delivery to each home it
serves depends on two crucial ingredients: maintaining a deep understanding of its
customers and staying agile across every aspect of its business, including product
development, production, and distribution."
"This is why HelloFresh uses Amazon Web Services (AWS). With AWS, HelloFresh gets a
reliable, global cloud infrastructure that easily scales to support the company\
u2019s growth around the world. With the help of AWS consultation and expertise,
HelloFresh has modernized its data capabilities, moving from its legacy database to
a data lake where it can centralize storage of both structured and unstructured
data. This makes it easier for HelloFresh to bring together information from
multiple data sources and use analytics tools to gather insights that it can use to
improve its services and create new offerings for customers. Using AWS, HelloFresh
maintains a closer connection to changing customer preferences and the flexibility
to quickly adapt its meal offerings and delivery services."
"HelloFresh runs much of its data management on Amazon Simple Storage Service
(Amazon S3), a service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance. It also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon
RDS) for automating time-consuming administration tasks related to database
management, such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.
Also important to HelloFresh data management is Amazon EMR, a big data platform
that makes it easier to process vast amounts of data using open source tools."
"See how HelloFresh is using AWS to deliver personalized customer experiences in
the new \u201cAWS Is How\u201d campaign. Learn how retail companies can use AWS to
build solutions that enhance customer experiences and deliver insights that improve
operations."
"BigBasket Grows Bigger with 400,000 Daily Orders on AWS"
"2021"
"Traffic Spikes Sixfold during Lockdown"
"The online grocery market in India is competitive and value-driven, with some 20
companies vying for shoppers in a market that\u2019s expected to hit $10.5 billion
by 2023. The central government\u2019s development of smart cities includes
infrastructure to support the growth of ecommerce, and many large companies are
making plays to get in on the action."
"BigBasket, India\u2019s largest online grocery, has been in business since 2011.
Customer retention is at the heart of its strategy, as well as a hyper-local
approach to inventory. BigBasket is available in 21 cities and runs its
infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The business had been
growing 20\u201330 percent each year, but when COVID-19 struck and India went into
lockdown, BigBasket faced unprecedented demand. Daily traffic was suddenly six
times higher than pre\u2013COVID-19 peaks."
"Big Basket"
"kr_quotemark"
"With AWS, we have all the pieces of the puzzle to smoothly run a large ecommerce
architecture."
"Rakshit Daga"
"Chief Technology Officer, BigBasket"
" "
"Microservices and Containers Boost Efficiency"
"BigBasket subscribes to AWS Enterprise Support and immediately consulted with the
AWS team for advice on scaling its architecture efficiently. \u201cAWS Enterprise
Support has been our go-to destination for all queries when we\u2019re building
something new or maintaining and enhancing existing functions,\u201d says Rakshit
Daga, chief technology officer at BigBasket. \u201cGiven the breadth of AWS
solutions we use, we have questions on all kinds of topics, and Enterprise Support
connects us to the right person quickly.\u201d"
"The company had already begun shifting to asynchronous work queues in 2018,
isolating workloads into containers and breaking up its monolithic architecture.
However, the onset of the 2020 lockdown shifted this process into high gear. By
mid-2020, the company was fully containerized with 60 microservices running on
Kubernetes."
"Gourmeat Boosts Efficiency and Productivity by 40% on Amazon Lightsail"
"2021"
"Gourmeat, a meat boutique founded in Uruguay and with US operations in Miami,
Florida, was using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to manage isolated inventories
manually, but this time-consuming process was hampering its growth. "
"Looking to modernize its data solution, Gourmeat turned to Amazon Web Services
(AWS) and AWS Select Consulting Partner Nub8. Within weeks, the company had a new
inventory management system hosted on Amazon Lightsail, a simple-to-use virtual
private server that offers everything needed to build a web application. Gourmeat\
u2019s integrated cloud-based inventory application reduces time spent on inventory
management, maintains reliable and secure data, and enables key decision makers in
the company to have simultaneous data access."
"Gourmeat storefront"
"kr_quotemark"
"Once we started using the solution built on Amazon Lightsail, inventory management
and report creation went from approximately 4 hours a week to less than 20
minutes.\u201d"
"Lucia Albanell"
"CEO and cofounder, Gourmeat"
"Moving to Integrated Inventory Management"
"Founded in 2013, Gourmeat sells hormone- and antibiotic-free meat online and in
stores in Uruguay and Miami. Before turning to AWS and Nub8, Gourmeat managed
inventory through manual reports from its vendors. \u201cThe old system used
isolated applications, and it didn\u2019t enable simultaneous access for decision
makers across the company,\u201d says Lucia Albanell, CEO and cofounder of
Gourmeat. \u201cThis resulted in inefficiencies and low confidence in data
quality.\u201d "
"Pearson Boosts Security and Productivity Using Amazon Elasticsearch Service"
"2020"
"Global educational media company Pearson needed a more efficient way to analyze
and gain insights from its log data. With a number of teams in various locations
using Elasticsearch\u2014the popular open-source tool for search and log analytics\
u2014Pearson found that keeping track of log data and managing updates led to high
operating costs. Faced with this, as well as increasingly complex security log
management and analysis, the company found a solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Pearson quickly saw improvements by migrating from its self-managed open-source
Elasticsearch architecture to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, a fully managed service
that makes it easy to deploy, secure, and run Elasticsearch cost effectively at
scale. Rather than spending considerable time and resources on managing the
Elasticsearch clusters on its own, Pearson used the managed Amazon Elasticsearch
Service as part of its initiative to modernize its products. "
"Shot of two young women using a laptop together in a college library"
"kr_quotemark"
"As we migrate to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, we can start to focus on what\
u2019s necessary from a security perspective. We can bring in different skill sets
and focus on what\u2019s more important to the company rather than just maintaining
standard hardware or infrastructure.\u201d "
"Muthu Meyyappan"
"VP of Security Engineering and Product Security Officer, Pearson"
"Meeting the Needs of the Modern World"
"As one of the largest and oldest educational companies in the world, Pearson
operates in 70 different countries. The company provides a wide variety of
educational content and assessments and other services, which are often specialized
for different target audiences. As the company moved toward digitization in the
cloud, it began to use AWS services. At first, Pearson used Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2)\u2014a web service that provides secure, resizable compute
capacity in the cloud\u2014to power its self-managed open-source Elasticsearch. But
the company found that a self-managed approach posed several challenges. \u201cOne
of the major issues we had was with the security portion of the fine-grained access
control\u2014we weren\u2019t able to work through that,\u201d says Muthu Meyyappan,
vice president of security engineering and product security officer for Pearson. \
u201cAnother challenge was maintaining the upgrades and the usual service
management below the line, which consumed the effort of a full-time engineer to
maintain the platform.\u201d"
"In order to iron out its access control to log data and reduce the amount of time
spent on updates, Pearson turned to Amazon Elasticsearch Service. \u201cWhen we
were updating the open-source Elasticsearch, it took time to make sure we didn\
u2019t miss any data,\u201d says Meyyappan. \u201cWe were looking to have someone
else take that accountability. If there is data lost, for example, Amazon
Elasticsearch Service enables us to go back 14 days and get the index back.
Features like that encouraged us to migrate to the managed service.\u201d"
"TestWe Turns to AWS to Drive Global Expansion"
"2021"
"In 2014, colleagues Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier and Charles Zhu came across a study
that indicated 95 percent of European students owned laptops. However, educational
institutions continued to rely on paper-based exams. That\u2019s when R\u00e9gnier
and Zhu decided to launch TestWe, a platform for administering in-class and remote
computer-based assessments. \u201cStudents were using their devices for taking
notes, research, and sending emails,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cIt only made
sense for them to use their laptops to take exams as well.\u201d"
"The TestWe solution gives students the ability to take exams securely, in the
classroom or at home. Educational institutions can administer digital exams while
eliminating the possibility of students getting help from online resources or other
people since the tests are taken offline and recorded by a camera. The TestWe exam
process runs in the cloud and can be fully integrated into a school\u2019s learning
management system. Additionally, the tests can run directly on any type of student
devices."
"Today, TestWe is available in seven different languages and used in countries
throughout Western Europe as well as in North and South America. Every year, TestWe
helps teachers create millions of test questions."
"Student studies outside"
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS services enhances our credibility. Partners and customers know our tests
will run reliably and scale easily.\u201d"
"Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier"
"Cofounder and Chief Commercial Officer, TestWe"
"Global Expansion Requires Greater Firepower in the Cloud"
"In the early years of the company, TestWe relied on a regional cloud-platform
provider to host its applications. The company then began to expand to markets
throughout Western Europe and into Canada and South America. R\u00e9gnier and Zhu
soon realized they needed to migrate their testing applications to a provider with
global capabilities\u2014one that could deliver applications from local regional
data centers. \u201cWe wanted to ensure students, teachers, and administrators
continued to experience fast performance when interacting with the tests, no matter
where they are located,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cAnd with a larger customer
base, we needed to make sure our cloud infrastructure could handle spikes in
activity.\u201d"
"University of Oxford Introduces a Sector-Leading Image Recognition ML Prototype to
Augment Digitization in Numismatics"
"2021"
"The University of Oxford houses 21 million objects in the collections of its
Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM)\u2014artifacts and specimens that are among the
world\u2019s most significant. One aspect of GLAM\u2019s mission is to preserve
these assets and make them accessible to the world for education and research.
However, the organization has only enough space to display about 10 percent of its
holdings at a time, and there\u2019s an enormous backlog of artifacts still waiting
to be cataloged. To tackle that obstacle, GLAM used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to
build an enhanced image recognition system that would help accelerate the process
of cataloging artifacts."
"The Gardens and Museums IT team used Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service
that provides developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and
deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. Powered by Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, the models were trained and deployed at low cost to
automatically catalog the extensive coin collection of the Ashmolean Museum\
u2014which is the United Kingdom\u2019s first public museum and the world\u2019s
first university museum. On AWS, the image recognition system identifies and
catalogs coins in a fraction of the time it would take human volunteers to complete
the same task."
"Exterior of the Ashmolean Museum."
"kr_quotemark"
"I thought this project would be complex and time consuming, but using AWS made it
easy.\u201d"
"Anjanesh Babu"
"Systems Architect and Network Manager, Gardens and Museums IT, University of
Oxford's Gardens, Libraries & Museums"
"Updating Infrastructure and Creating an ML-Based Cataloging System on AWS"
"GLAM comprises four museums\u2014the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, the
Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the
History of Science Museum\u2014as well as the Bodleian Libraries and the Oxford
Botanic Garden & Harcourt Arboretum. In 2019, GLAM saw 900,000 visitors to its
digital collections. Its 21 million objects include live specimens and plants,
historical artifacts, and even images of objects that were damaged, lost, or
returned to collectors. \u201cFor many years, the museums were not overly active at
investing in and managing the information technology infrastructure that underpins
all our digital services,\u201d says Anjanesh Babu, systems architect and network
manager at Gardens and Museums IT. \u201cAfter years of underinvestment in outdated
infrastructure, the University of Oxford brought together a strategic focus on
digital transformation through the GLAM Digital program.\u201d As part of this
program, the Digital Estate Improvement project was the foundational part to
deliver root and branch improvements to the infrastructure to make it fit to meet
the digital aspirations laid out in the objectives. In 2017, the project uploaded
60 TB of digital records to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object
storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance."
"UFE Mongolia Goes Online in 10 Days with AWS"
"2020"
"UFE-Mongolia_Customer-Reference_Image"
"kr_quotemark"
"The University had years and years of content. The challenge was how to move it to
the new system. Using AWS, it took us only three days.\u201d"
"Ankhtuya Dorisuren"
"Vice President, UFE"
"Founded in 1924, the University of Finance and Economics (UFE) is one of the
oldest educational institutions in Mongolia.It has over 6,000 students and more
than 300 employees and has successfully been running some online courses using on-
premises technology since 2015. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, UFE
used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to move all teaching online in less than two weeks,
enabling students to continue their studies remotely."
"On-Premises Infrastructure Not Up to the Job"
"At the beginning of 2020, UFE was using a local data center with two local
servers. But when more than 400 students tried to access it at once, the system was
overloaded, resulting in the entire learning management system going offline. The
local power supply was unreliable and the server would need to be restarted
manually after every power outage. Ankhtuya Dorisuren, UFE vice president,
explains: \u201cThis made it really difficult for students taking courses who lived
in the countryside and needed to access resources and teaching remotely.\u201d "
"In late January, the government of Mongolia announced a nationwide lockdown with
strict quarantine measures. All educational institutions closed within the space of
a week and overseas students were recalled home. This presented UFE with a problem:
how to continue providing all students with top-quality teaching while complying
with the lockdown restrictions. The speed of implementation was critical, as was
the need for an accessible and reliable system. UFE decided to transfer its entire
online learning management system to AWS cloud-based infrastructure\u2014and did so
within just 10-days."
"Uchi.ru Takes Lockdown Schoolchildren Online with AWS"
"2021"
"Uchi.ru became a first responder for education, keeping students learning, when
COVID-19 hit. The company provides school-age learning services around the world,
including Asia, Canada, Latin America, Russia, South Africa, and the USA.
Originally designed for use in the classroom and for extracurricular self-
education, its services employ an engaging, gamified approach to enhance
education."
"When the pandemic took hold, schools were shut down and the company found itself
having to provide remote learning for a much larger student audience. It rapidly
introduced new free services for schools, children, and teachers, providing large-
scale informational, methodological support for its school communities."
"The company soon found that its co-located servers were unable to cope with a
massive increase in usage, with more than 240,000 users now on the site at once,
compared to around 60,000 previously."
"Uchi.ru turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the urgent migration needed to
scale and meet the demand\u2014a migration that was achieved successfully and
quickly."
"Uchi-customer-references"
"kr_quotemark"
"The migration took three days. It wasn\u2019t business as usual and we were
outside our comfort zone, but it turned out to be fast, smooth, and practically
flawless in execution.\u201d"
"Alexey Vakhov"
"Chief Technical Officer, Uchi.ru"
"Turning to the Cloud to Cope with Overnight Demand"
"As the sector\u2019s largest educational technology provider, Uchi.ru had some
350,000 Russian speakers access its classroom services at least once a day at the
beginning of 2020. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, all schools closed with
little notice."
"The Uchi.ru team responded rapidly, introducing new distance-learning tools and
services to support students and teachers. They found extremely high demand for
distance learning and as a result, Uchi.ru was on the front line of education
provision, no longer an adjunct but of primary importance to the whole school-age
education system."
"Pomelo Fashion Enhances Shoppers\u2019 Experience, Increases Revenue Using Amazon
Personalize"
"2021"
"Pomelo Fashion, a global fashion e-commerce service based in Southeast Asia, had
been displaying items on its website in much the same way since it was founded in
2013. The setup had grown stale, not to mention that the algorithm for displaying
the items relied on old data streams with limited inputs and spotty accuracy. So as
a fast-growing, innovative startup, Pomelo Fashion set out to create personalized
customer experiences that would improve the discoverability of new items and
increase revenue\u2014and it needed a solution that would do so at scale. "
"Pomelo Fashion turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and used Amazon Personalize,
which enables developers to build applications with the same machine learning (ML)
technology used by Amazon.com for real-time personalized recommendations. By using
Amazon Personalize\u2014and the services of AWS Advanced Technology Partners
Segment and Braze\u2014to build fresh sorting and categorizing features, Pomelo
Fashion created a unique, personalized shopping experience that boosts customer
engagement and more efficiently converts it into sales."
"Smiling attractive young african woman"
"kr_quotemark"
"When you think of e-commerce, you think of AWS. New services are always coming out
on AWS, and support is very good.\u201d"
"Shane Leese"
"Business Intelligence Director, Pomelo Fashion"
"Updating a Years-Old Algorithm Using Amazon Personalize"
"Pomelo Fashion sells apparel online and in 18 retail locations throughout
Southeast Asia. Shipping to nearly two million customers in more than 50 countries,
the company currently employs 500 staff members across its corporate offices,
retail stores, and warehouses. Its gross revenue tripled from 2017 to 2018, doubled
from 2018 to 2019, and is on track to double in 2020 despite the overall global
economy being down\u2014in July 2020 alone, the company reported $7.5 million in
revenue. For years, Pomelo Fashion relied on an algorithm that ranked products on
category pages\u2014such as \u201cDresses,\u201d \u201cBlouses,\u201d and \
u201cPants & Bottoms\u201d\u2014based on page views and sales, blending the trends
of the past 30 days with lifetime behaviors, product price, and newest releases.
The rank was calculated daily and stored in a database, providing an identical
experience for every user by country. "
"Neiman Marcus Increases New Application Speed to Market by 50% on AWS, Improves
Digital Selling for Associates"
"2021"
"A luxury household name, Neiman Marcus has a reputation for delivering a first-
class, personalized customer service experience. To modernize and enhance that
experience, the company wanted to develop Connect, an omnichannel digital selling
application that would empower associates to view rich, personalized customer
information with the goal of making each customer interaction unforgettable. When
the COVID-19 pandemic forced many retail stores to close, the company\u2019s sales
moved exclusively online. To continue providing the hallmark experience that had
always attracted customers, Neiman Marcus needed to launch Connect quickly to
enable associates to perform digital selling. "
"Choosing a serverless architecture with mobile development solutions on Amazon Web
Services (AWS) enabled the development team to launch the app much faster than in
the 4 months it had originally planned. \u201cUsing AWS cloud-native and serverless
technologies, we increased our speed to market by at least 50 percent and were able
to accelerate the launch of Connect,\u201d says Sriram Vaidyanathan, senior
director of omni engineering at Neiman Marcus. This approach also greatly reduced
app-building costs and provided developers with more agility for the development
and rapid deployment of updates. The app elastically scales to support traffic at
any volume for greater cost efficiency, and it has increased"
"associate productivity."
"Female sales associate peruses clothing rack. "
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS Amplify on a serverless architecture cost us 90 percent less than if we
had built the app using a more traditional method. This is a huge win for us.\
u201d"
"Hemanth Jayaraman"
"Senior Director of Cloud Engineering, Neiman Marcus"
"Empowering Associates to Elevate the Customer Experience"
"Neiman Marcus is the flagship brand of the Neiman Marcus Group, a luxury retail
organization founded in 1907 and generating $2.6 billion in annual revenue from its
subsidiaries. Before Neiman Marcus developed Connect, associates were using an
assortment of tools and technologies to provide customer service. Each solution
provided a"
"different piece of information an associate needed to generate a sale. Some of
these solutions were outdated, and all of them were creating friction. As a result,
they were increasing sell times and decreasing associate productivity."
"AWS for Industries"
"AWS is How: HelloFresh Delivers a Personalized Experience to Millions of Customers
Around the World"
"by Ed Jimenez | on 21 MAY 2021 | in Amazon EMR, Amazon Simple Storage Services
(S3), Industries, Retail | Permalink | Comments | Share"
"Mealtimes are important sources of connection, comfort, and self-care. And though
we all have different lifestyles and preferences, we tend to crave similar
qualities when it comes to food: variety, novelty, nutrition, convenience, and
great taste. In essence, great food experiences are personal experiences that offer
plenty of choice and flexibility."
"HelloFreshEnter HelloFresh, the most popular meal kit in the world. HelloFresh
provides fresh, healthy, affordable ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes that are
delivered straight to your door. The company also operates a lean and innovative
supply chain designed to eliminate food waste, reduce carbon emissions, optimize
packaging, and favor local ingredient sourcing. With operations in 14 countries,
HelloFresh delivered more than 600 million meals to 5.3 million active customers
last year, providing organized, preportioned meal kits tailored to serve different
household sizes, schedules, and tastes. The HelloFresh approach to meeting diverse
needs, creating new menu options, and providing convenient delivery to each home it
serves depends on two crucial ingredients: maintaining a deep understanding of its
customers and staying agile across every aspect of its business, including product
development, production, and distribution."
"This is why HelloFresh uses Amazon Web Services (AWS). With AWS, HelloFresh gets a
reliable, global cloud infrastructure that easily scales to support the company\
u2019s growth around the world. With the help of AWS consultation and expertise,
HelloFresh has modernized its data capabilities, moving from its legacy database to
a data lake where it can centralize storage of both structured and unstructured
data. This makes it easier for HelloFresh to bring together information from
multiple data sources and use analytics tools to gather insights that it can use to
improve its services and create new offerings for customers. Using AWS, HelloFresh
maintains a closer connection to changing customer preferences and the flexibility
to quickly adapt its meal offerings and delivery services."
"HelloFresh runs much of its data management on Amazon Simple Storage Service
(Amazon S3), a service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance. It also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon
RDS) for automating time-consuming administration tasks related to database
management, such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.
Also important to HelloFresh data management is Amazon EMR, a big data platform
that makes it easier to process vast amounts of data using open source tools."
"See how HelloFresh is using AWS to deliver personalized customer experiences in
the new \u201cAWS Is How\u201d campaign. Learn how retail companies can use AWS to
build solutions that enhance customer experiences and deliver insights that improve
operations."
"BigBasket Grows Bigger with 400,000 Daily Orders on AWS"
"2021"
"Traffic Spikes Sixfold during Lockdown"
"The online grocery market in India is competitive and value-driven, with some 20
companies vying for shoppers in a market that\u2019s expected to hit $10.5 billion
by 2023. The central government\u2019s development of smart cities includes
infrastructure to support the growth of ecommerce, and many large companies are
making plays to get in on the action."
"BigBasket, India\u2019s largest online grocery, has been in business since 2011.
Customer retention is at the heart of its strategy, as well as a hyper-local
approach to inventory. BigBasket is available in 21 cities and runs its
infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The business had been
growing 20\u201330 percent each year, but when COVID-19 struck and India went into
lockdown, BigBasket faced unprecedented demand. Daily traffic was suddenly six
times higher than pre\u2013COVID-19 peaks."
"Big Basket"
"kr_quotemark"
"With AWS, we have all the pieces of the puzzle to smoothly run a large ecommerce
architecture."
"Rakshit Daga"
"Chief Technology Officer, BigBasket"
" "
"Microservices and Containers Boost Efficiency"
"BigBasket subscribes to AWS Enterprise Support and immediately consulted with the
AWS team for advice on scaling its architecture efficiently. \u201cAWS Enterprise
Support has been our go-to destination for all queries when we\u2019re building
something new or maintaining and enhancing existing functions,\u201d says Rakshit
Daga, chief technology officer at BigBasket. \u201cGiven the breadth of AWS
solutions we use, we have questions on all kinds of topics, and Enterprise Support
connects us to the right person quickly.\u201d"
"The company had already begun shifting to asynchronous work queues in 2018,
isolating workloads into containers and breaking up its monolithic architecture.
However, the onset of the 2020 lockdown shifted this process into high gear. By
mid-2020, the company was fully containerized with 60 microservices running on
Kubernetes."
"Gourmeat Boosts Efficiency and Productivity by 40% on Amazon Lightsail"
"2021"
"Gourmeat, a meat boutique founded in Uruguay and with US operations in Miami,
Florida, was using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to manage isolated inventories
manually, but this time-consuming process was hampering its growth. "
"Looking to modernize its data solution, Gourmeat turned to Amazon Web Services
(AWS) and AWS Select Consulting Partner Nub8. Within weeks, the company had a new
inventory management system hosted on Amazon Lightsail, a simple-to-use virtual
private server that offers everything needed to build a web application. Gourmeat\
u2019s integrated cloud-based inventory application reduces time spent on inventory
management, maintains reliable and secure data, and enables key decision makers in
the company to have simultaneous data access."
"Gourmeat storefront"
"kr_quotemark"
"Once we started using the solution built on Amazon Lightsail, inventory management
and report creation went from approximately 4 hours a week to less than 20
minutes.\u201d"
"Lucia Albanell"
"CEO and cofounder, Gourmeat"
"Moving to Integrated Inventory Management"
"Founded in 2013, Gourmeat sells hormone- and antibiotic-free meat online and in
stores in Uruguay and Miami. Before turning to AWS and Nub8, Gourmeat managed
inventory through manual reports from its vendors. \u201cThe old system used
isolated applications, and it didn\u2019t enable simultaneous access for decision
makers across the company,\u201d says Lucia Albanell, CEO and cofounder of
Gourmeat. \u201cThis resulted in inefficiencies and low confidence in data
quality.\u201d "
"AWS for Industries"
"AWS is How: HelloFresh Delivers a Personalized Experience to Millions of Customers
Around the World"
"by Ed Jimenez | on 21 MAY 2021 | in Amazon EMR, Amazon Simple Storage Services
(S3), Industries, Retail | Permalink | Comments | Share"
"Mealtimes are important sources of connection, comfort, and self-care. And though
we all have different lifestyles and preferences, we tend to crave similar
qualities when it comes to food: variety, novelty, nutrition, convenience, and
great taste. In essence, great food experiences are personal experiences that offer
plenty of choice and flexibility."
"HelloFreshEnter HelloFresh, the most popular meal kit in the world. HelloFresh
provides fresh, healthy, affordable ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes that are
delivered straight to your door. The company also operates a lean and innovative
supply chain designed to eliminate food waste, reduce carbon emissions, optimize
packaging, and favor local ingredient sourcing. With operations in 14 countries,
HelloFresh delivered more than 600 million meals to 5.3 million active customers
last year, providing organized, preportioned meal kits tailored to serve different
household sizes, schedules, and tastes. The HelloFresh approach to meeting diverse
needs, creating new menu options, and providing convenient delivery to each home it
serves depends on two crucial ingredients: maintaining a deep understanding of its
customers and staying agile across every aspect of its business, including product
development, production, and distribution."
"This is why HelloFresh uses Amazon Web Services (AWS). With AWS, HelloFresh gets a
reliable, global cloud infrastructure that easily scales to support the company\
u2019s growth around the world. With the help of AWS consultation and expertise,
HelloFresh has modernized its data capabilities, moving from its legacy database to
a data lake where it can centralize storage of both structured and unstructured
data. This makes it easier for HelloFresh to bring together information from
multiple data sources and use analytics tools to gather insights that it can use to
improve its services and create new offerings for customers. Using AWS, HelloFresh
maintains a closer connection to changing customer preferences and the flexibility
to quickly adapt its meal offerings and delivery services."
"HelloFresh runs much of its data management on Amazon Simple Storage Service
(Amazon S3), a service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance. It also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon
RDS) for automating time-consuming administration tasks related to database
management, such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.
Also important to HelloFresh data management is Amazon EMR, a big data platform
that makes it easier to process vast amounts of data using open source tools."
"See how HelloFresh is using AWS to deliver personalized customer experiences in
the new \u201cAWS Is How\u201d campaign. Learn how retail companies can use AWS to
build solutions that enhance customer experiences and deliver insights that improve
operations."
"BigBasket Grows Bigger with 400,000 Daily Orders on AWS"
"2021"
"Traffic Spikes Sixfold during Lockdown"
"The online grocery market in India is competitive and value-driven, with some 20
companies vying for shoppers in a market that\u2019s expected to hit $10.5 billion
by 2023. The central government\u2019s development of smart cities includes
infrastructure to support the growth of ecommerce, and many large companies are
making plays to get in on the action."
"BigBasket, India\u2019s largest online grocery, has been in business since 2011.
Customer retention is at the heart of its strategy, as well as a hyper-local
approach to inventory. BigBasket is available in 21 cities and runs its
infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The business had been
growing 20\u201330 percent each year, but when COVID-19 struck and India went into
lockdown, BigBasket faced unprecedented demand. Daily traffic was suddenly six
times higher than pre\u2013COVID-19 peaks."
"Big Basket"
"kr_quotemark"
"With AWS, we have all the pieces of the puzzle to smoothly run a large ecommerce
architecture."
"Rakshit Daga"
"Chief Technology Officer, BigBasket"
" "
"Microservices and Containers Boost Efficiency"
"BigBasket subscribes to AWS Enterprise Support and immediately consulted with the
AWS team for advice on scaling its architecture efficiently. \u201cAWS Enterprise
Support has been our go-to destination for all queries when we\u2019re building
something new or maintaining and enhancing existing functions,\u201d says Rakshit
Daga, chief technology officer at BigBasket. \u201cGiven the breadth of AWS
solutions we use, we have questions on all kinds of topics, and Enterprise Support
connects us to the right person quickly.\u201d"
"The company had already begun shifting to asynchronous work queues in 2018,
isolating workloads into containers and breaking up its monolithic architecture.
However, the onset of the 2020 lockdown shifted this process into high gear. By
mid-2020, the company was fully containerized with 60 microservices running on
Kubernetes."
"Gourmeat Boosts Efficiency and Productivity by 40% on Amazon Lightsail"
"2021"
"Gourmeat, a meat boutique founded in Uruguay and with US operations in Miami,
Florida, was using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to manage isolated inventories
manually, but this time-consuming process was hampering its growth. "
"Looking to modernize its data solution, Gourmeat turned to Amazon Web Services
(AWS) and AWS Select Consulting Partner Nub8. Within weeks, the company had a new
inventory management system hosted on Amazon Lightsail, a simple-to-use virtual
private server that offers everything needed to build a web application. Gourmeat\
u2019s integrated cloud-based inventory application reduces time spent on inventory
management, maintains reliable and secure data, and enables key decision makers in
the company to have simultaneous data access."
"Gourmeat storefront"
"kr_quotemark"
"Once we started using the solution built on Amazon Lightsail, inventory management
and report creation went from approximately 4 hours a week to less than 20
minutes.\u201d"
"Lucia Albanell"
"CEO and cofounder, Gourmeat"
"Moving to Integrated Inventory Management"
"Founded in 2013, Gourmeat sells hormone- and antibiotic-free meat online and in
stores in Uruguay and Miami. Before turning to AWS and Nub8, Gourmeat managed
inventory through manual reports from its vendors. \u201cThe old system used
isolated applications, and it didn\u2019t enable simultaneous access for decision
makers across the company,\u201d says Lucia Albanell, CEO and cofounder of
Gourmeat. \u201cThis resulted in inefficiencies and low confidence in data
quality.\u201d "
"Pearson Boosts Security and Productivity Using Amazon Elasticsearch Service"
"2020"
"Global educational media company Pearson needed a more efficient way to analyze
and gain insights from its log data. With a number of teams in various locations
using Elasticsearch\u2014the popular open-source tool for search and log analytics\
u2014Pearson found that keeping track of log data and managing updates led to high
operating costs. Faced with this, as well as increasingly complex security log
management and analysis, the company found a solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Pearson quickly saw improvements by migrating from its self-managed open-source
Elasticsearch architecture to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, a fully managed service
that makes it easy to deploy, secure, and run Elasticsearch cost effectively at
scale. Rather than spending considerable time and resources on managing the
Elasticsearch clusters on its own, Pearson used the managed Amazon Elasticsearch
Service as part of its initiative to modernize its products. "
"Shot of two young women using a laptop together in a college library"
"kr_quotemark"
"As we migrate to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, we can start to focus on what\
u2019s necessary from a security perspective. We can bring in different skill sets
and focus on what\u2019s more important to the company rather than just maintaining
standard hardware or infrastructure.\u201d "
"Muthu Meyyappan"
"VP of Security Engineering and Product Security Officer, Pearson"
"Meeting the Needs of the Modern World"
"As one of the largest and oldest educational companies in the world, Pearson
operates in 70 different countries. The company provides a wide variety of
educational content and assessments and other services, which are often specialized
for different target audiences. As the company moved toward digitization in the
cloud, it began to use AWS services. At first, Pearson used Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2)\u2014a web service that provides secure, resizable compute
capacity in the cloud\u2014to power its self-managed open-source Elasticsearch. But
the company found that a self-managed approach posed several challenges. \u201cOne
of the major issues we had was with the security portion of the fine-grained access
control\u2014we weren\u2019t able to work through that,\u201d says Muthu Meyyappan,
vice president of security engineering and product security officer for Pearson. \
u201cAnother challenge was maintaining the upgrades and the usual service
management below the line, which consumed the effort of a full-time engineer to
maintain the platform.\u201d"
"In order to iron out its access control to log data and reduce the amount of time
spent on updates, Pearson turned to Amazon Elasticsearch Service. \u201cWhen we
were updating the open-source Elasticsearch, it took time to make sure we didn\
u2019t miss any data,\u201d says Meyyappan. \u201cWe were looking to have someone
else take that accountability. If there is data lost, for example, Amazon
Elasticsearch Service enables us to go back 14 days and get the index back.
Features like that encouraged us to migrate to the managed service.\u201d"
"TestWe Turns to AWS to Drive Global Expansion"
"2021"
"In 2014, colleagues Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier and Charles Zhu came across a study
that indicated 95 percent of European students owned laptops. However, educational
institutions continued to rely on paper-based exams. That\u2019s when R\u00e9gnier
and Zhu decided to launch TestWe, a platform for administering in-class and remote
computer-based assessments. \u201cStudents were using their devices for taking
notes, research, and sending emails,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cIt only made
sense for them to use their laptops to take exams as well.\u201d"
"The TestWe solution gives students the ability to take exams securely, in the
classroom or at home. Educational institutions can administer digital exams while
eliminating the possibility of students getting help from online resources or other
people since the tests are taken offline and recorded by a camera. The TestWe exam
process runs in the cloud and can be fully integrated into a school\u2019s learning
management system. Additionally, the tests can run directly on any type of student
devices."
"Today, TestWe is available in seven different languages and used in countries
throughout Western Europe as well as in North and South America. Every year, TestWe
helps teachers create millions of test questions."
"Student studies outside"
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS services enhances our credibility. Partners and customers know our tests
will run reliably and scale easily.\u201d"
"Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier"
"Cofounder and Chief Commercial Officer, TestWe"
"Global Expansion Requires Greater Firepower in the Cloud"
"In the early years of the company, TestWe relied on a regional cloud-platform
provider to host its applications. The company then began to expand to markets
throughout Western Europe and into Canada and South America. R\u00e9gnier and Zhu
soon realized they needed to migrate their testing applications to a provider with
global capabilities\u2014one that could deliver applications from local regional
data centers. \u201cWe wanted to ensure students, teachers, and administrators
continued to experience fast performance when interacting with the tests, no matter
where they are located,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cAnd with a larger customer
base, we needed to make sure our cloud infrastructure could handle spikes in
activity.\u201d"
"University of Oxford Introduces a Sector-Leading Image Recognition ML Prototype to
Augment Digitization in Numismatics"
"2021"
"The University of Oxford houses 21 million objects in the collections of its
Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM)\u2014artifacts and specimens that are among the
world\u2019s most significant. One aspect of GLAM\u2019s mission is to preserve
these assets and make them accessible to the world for education and research.
However, the organization has only enough space to display about 10 percent of its
holdings at a time, and there\u2019s an enormous backlog of artifacts still waiting
to be cataloged. To tackle that obstacle, GLAM used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to
build an enhanced image recognition system that would help accelerate the process
of cataloging artifacts."
"The Gardens and Museums IT team used Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service
that provides developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and
deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. Powered by Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, the models were trained and deployed at low cost to
automatically catalog the extensive coin collection of the Ashmolean Museum\
u2014which is the United Kingdom\u2019s first public museum and the world\u2019s
first university museum. On AWS, the image recognition system identifies and
catalogs coins in a fraction of the time it would take human volunteers to complete
the same task."
"Exterior of the Ashmolean Museum."
"kr_quotemark"
"I thought this project would be complex and time consuming, but using AWS made it
easy.\u201d"
"Anjanesh Babu"
"Systems Architect and Network Manager, Gardens and Museums IT, University of
Oxford's Gardens, Libraries & Museums"
"Updating Infrastructure and Creating an ML-Based Cataloging System on AWS"
"GLAM comprises four museums\u2014the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, the
Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the
History of Science Museum\u2014as well as the Bodleian Libraries and the Oxford
Botanic Garden & Harcourt Arboretum. In 2019, GLAM saw 900,000 visitors to its
digital collections. Its 21 million objects include live specimens and plants,
historical artifacts, and even images of objects that were damaged, lost, or
returned to collectors. \u201cFor many years, the museums were not overly active at
investing in and managing the information technology infrastructure that underpins
all our digital services,\u201d says Anjanesh Babu, systems architect and network
manager at Gardens and Museums IT. \u201cAfter years of underinvestment in outdated
infrastructure, the University of Oxford brought together a strategic focus on
digital transformation through the GLAM Digital program.\u201d As part of this
program, the Digital Estate Improvement project was the foundational part to
deliver root and branch improvements to the infrastructure to make it fit to meet
the digital aspirations laid out in the objectives. In 2017, the project uploaded
60 TB of digital records to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object
storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance."
"UFE Mongolia Goes Online in 10 Days with AWS"
"2020"
"UFE-Mongolia_Customer-Reference_Image"
"kr_quotemark"
"The University had years and years of content. The challenge was how to move it to
the new system. Using AWS, it took us only three days.\u201d"
"Ankhtuya Dorisuren"
"Vice President, UFE"
"Founded in 1924, the University of Finance and Economics (UFE) is one of the
oldest educational institutions in Mongolia.It has over 6,000 students and more
than 300 employees and has successfully been running some online courses using on-
premises technology since 2015. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, UFE
used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to move all teaching online in less than two weeks,
enabling students to continue their studies remotely."
"On-Premises Infrastructure Not Up to the Job"
"At the beginning of 2020, UFE was using a local data center with two local
servers. But when more than 400 students tried to access it at once, the system was
overloaded, resulting in the entire learning management system going offline. The
local power supply was unreliable and the server would need to be restarted
manually after every power outage. Ankhtuya Dorisuren, UFE vice president,
explains: \u201cThis made it really difficult for students taking courses who lived
in the countryside and needed to access resources and teaching remotely.\u201d "
"In late January, the government of Mongolia announced a nationwide lockdown with
strict quarantine measures. All educational institutions closed within the space of
a week and overseas students were recalled home. This presented UFE with a problem:
how to continue providing all students with top-quality teaching while complying
with the lockdown restrictions. The speed of implementation was critical, as was
the need for an accessible and reliable system. UFE decided to transfer its entire
online learning management system to AWS cloud-based infrastructure\u2014and did so
within just 10-days."
"Uchi.ru Takes Lockdown Schoolchildren Online with AWS"
"2021"
"Uchi.ru became a first responder for education, keeping students learning, when
COVID-19 hit. The company provides school-age learning services around the world,
including Asia, Canada, Latin America, Russia, South Africa, and the USA.
Originally designed for use in the classroom and for extracurricular self-
education, its services employ an engaging, gamified approach to enhance
education."
"When the pandemic took hold, schools were shut down and the company found itself
having to provide remote learning for a much larger student audience. It rapidly
introduced new free services for schools, children, and teachers, providing large-
scale informational, methodological support for its school communities."
"The company soon found that its co-located servers were unable to cope with a
massive increase in usage, with more than 240,000 users now on the site at once,
compared to around 60,000 previously."
"Uchi.ru turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the urgent migration needed to
scale and meet the demand\u2014a migration that was achieved successfully and
quickly."
"Uchi-customer-references"
"kr_quotemark"
"The migration took three days. It wasn\u2019t business as usual and we were
outside our comfort zone, but it turned out to be fast, smooth, and practically
flawless in execution.\u201d"
"Alexey Vakhov"
"Chief Technical Officer, Uchi.ru"
"Turning to the Cloud to Cope with Overnight Demand"
"As the sector\u2019s largest educational technology provider, Uchi.ru had some
350,000 Russian speakers access its classroom services at least once a day at the
beginning of 2020. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, all schools closed with
little notice."
"The Uchi.ru team responded rapidly, introducing new distance-learning tools and
services to support students and teachers. They found extremely high demand for
distance learning and as a result, Uchi.ru was on the front line of education
provision, no longer an adjunct but of primary importance to the whole school-age
education system."
"Pomelo Fashion Enhances Shoppers\u2019 Experience, Increases Revenue Using Amazon
Personalize"
"2021"
"Pomelo Fashion, a global fashion e-commerce service based in Southeast Asia, had
been displaying items on its website in much the same way since it was founded in
2013. The setup had grown stale, not to mention that the algorithm for displaying
the items relied on old data streams with limited inputs and spotty accuracy. So as
a fast-growing, innovative startup, Pomelo Fashion set out to create personalized
customer experiences that would improve the discoverability of new items and
increase revenue\u2014and it needed a solution that would do so at scale. "
"Pomelo Fashion turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and used Amazon Personalize,
which enables developers to build applications with the same machine learning (ML)
technology used by Amazon.com for real-time personalized recommendations. By using
Amazon Personalize\u2014and the services of AWS Advanced Technology Partners
Segment and Braze\u2014to build fresh sorting and categorizing features, Pomelo
Fashion created a unique, personalized shopping experience that boosts customer
engagement and more efficiently converts it into sales."
"Smiling attractive young african woman"
"kr_quotemark"
"When you think of e-commerce, you think of AWS. New services are always coming out
on AWS, and support is very good.\u201d"
"Shane Leese"
"Business Intelligence Director, Pomelo Fashion"
"Updating a Years-Old Algorithm Using Amazon Personalize"
"Pomelo Fashion sells apparel online and in 18 retail locations throughout
Southeast Asia. Shipping to nearly two million customers in more than 50 countries,
the company currently employs 500 staff members across its corporate offices,
retail stores, and warehouses. Its gross revenue tripled from 2017 to 2018, doubled
from 2018 to 2019, and is on track to double in 2020 despite the overall global
economy being down\u2014in July 2020 alone, the company reported $7.5 million in
revenue. For years, Pomelo Fashion relied on an algorithm that ranked products on
category pages\u2014such as \u201cDresses,\u201d \u201cBlouses,\u201d and \
u201cPants & Bottoms\u201d\u2014based on page views and sales, blending the trends
of the past 30 days with lifetime behaviors, product price, and newest releases.
The rank was calculated daily and stored in a database, providing an identical
experience for every user by country. "
"Neiman Marcus Increases New Application Speed to Market by 50% on AWS, Improves
Digital Selling for Associates"
"2021"
"A luxury household name, Neiman Marcus has a reputation for delivering a first-
class, personalized customer service experience. To modernize and enhance that
experience, the company wanted to develop Connect, an omnichannel digital selling
application that would empower associates to view rich, personalized customer
information with the goal of making each customer interaction unforgettable. When
the COVID-19 pandemic forced many retail stores to close, the company\u2019s sales
moved exclusively online. To continue providing the hallmark experience that had
always attracted customers, Neiman Marcus needed to launch Connect quickly to
enable associates to perform digital selling. "
"Choosing a serverless architecture with mobile development solutions on Amazon Web
Services (AWS) enabled the development team to launch the app much faster than in
the 4 months it had originally planned. \u201cUsing AWS cloud-native and serverless
technologies, we increased our speed to market by at least 50 percent and were able
to accelerate the launch of Connect,\u201d says Sriram Vaidyanathan, senior
director of omni engineering at Neiman Marcus. This approach also greatly reduced
app-building costs and provided developers with more agility for the development
and rapid deployment of updates. The app elastically scales to support traffic at
any volume for greater cost efficiency, and it has increased"
"associate productivity."
"Female sales associate peruses clothing rack. "
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS Amplify on a serverless architecture cost us 90 percent less than if we
had built the app using a more traditional method. This is a huge win for us.\
u201d"
"Hemanth Jayaraman"
"Senior Director of Cloud Engineering, Neiman Marcus"
"Empowering Associates to Elevate the Customer Experience"
"Neiman Marcus is the flagship brand of the Neiman Marcus Group, a luxury retail
organization founded in 1907 and generating $2.6 billion in annual revenue from its
subsidiaries. Before Neiman Marcus developed Connect, associates were using an
assortment of tools and technologies to provide customer service. Each solution
provided a"
"different piece of information an associate needed to generate a sale. Some of
these solutions were outdated, and all of them were creating friction. As a result,
they were increasing sell times and decreasing associate productivity."
"AWS for Industries"
"AWS is How: HelloFresh Delivers a Personalized Experience to Millions of Customers
Around the World"
"by Ed Jimenez | on 21 MAY 2021 | in Amazon EMR, Amazon Simple Storage Services
(S3), Industries, Retail | Permalink | Comments | Share"
"Mealtimes are important sources of connection, comfort, and self-care. And though
we all have different lifestyles and preferences, we tend to crave similar
qualities when it comes to food: variety, novelty, nutrition, convenience, and
great taste. In essence, great food experiences are personal experiences that offer
plenty of choice and flexibility."
"HelloFreshEnter HelloFresh, the most popular meal kit in the world. HelloFresh
provides fresh, healthy, affordable ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes that are
delivered straight to your door. The company also operates a lean and innovative
supply chain designed to eliminate food waste, reduce carbon emissions, optimize
packaging, and favor local ingredient sourcing. With operations in 14 countries,
HelloFresh delivered more than 600 million meals to 5.3 million active customers
last year, providing organized, preportioned meal kits tailored to serve different
household sizes, schedules, and tastes. The HelloFresh approach to meeting diverse
needs, creating new menu options, and providing convenient delivery to each home it
serves depends on two crucial ingredients: maintaining a deep understanding of its
customers and staying agile across every aspect of its business, including product
development, production, and distribution."
"This is why HelloFresh uses Amazon Web Services (AWS). With AWS, HelloFresh gets a
reliable, global cloud infrastructure that easily scales to support the company\
u2019s growth around the world. With the help of AWS consultation and expertise,
HelloFresh has modernized its data capabilities, moving from its legacy database to
a data lake where it can centralize storage of both structured and unstructured
data. This makes it easier for HelloFresh to bring together information from
multiple data sources and use analytics tools to gather insights that it can use to
improve its services and create new offerings for customers. Using AWS, HelloFresh
maintains a closer connection to changing customer preferences and the flexibility
to quickly adapt its meal offerings and delivery services."
"HelloFresh runs much of its data management on Amazon Simple Storage Service
(Amazon S3), a service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance. It also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon
RDS) for automating time-consuming administration tasks related to database
management, such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.
Also important to HelloFresh data management is Amazon EMR, a big data platform
that makes it easier to process vast amounts of data using open source tools."
"See how HelloFresh is using AWS to deliver personalized customer experiences in
the new \u201cAWS Is How\u201d campaign. Learn how retail companies can use AWS to
build solutions that enhance customer experiences and deliver insights that improve
operations."
"BigBasket Grows Bigger with 400,000 Daily Orders on AWS"
"2021"
"Traffic Spikes Sixfold during Lockdown"
"The online grocery market in India is competitive and value-driven, with some 20
companies vying for shoppers in a market that\u2019s expected to hit $10.5 billion
by 2023. The central government\u2019s development of smart cities includes
infrastructure to support the growth of ecommerce, and many large companies are
making plays to get in on the action."
"BigBasket, India\u2019s largest online grocery, has been in business since 2011.
Customer retention is at the heart of its strategy, as well as a hyper-local
approach to inventory. BigBasket is available in 21 cities and runs its
infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The business had been
growing 20\u201330 percent each year, but when COVID-19 struck and India went into
lockdown, BigBasket faced unprecedented demand. Daily traffic was suddenly six
times higher than pre\u2013COVID-19 peaks."
"Big Basket"
"kr_quotemark"
"With AWS, we have all the pieces of the puzzle to smoothly run a large ecommerce
architecture."
"Rakshit Daga"
"Chief Technology Officer, BigBasket"
" "
"Microservices and Containers Boost Efficiency"
"BigBasket subscribes to AWS Enterprise Support and immediately consulted with the
AWS team for advice on scaling its architecture efficiently. \u201cAWS Enterprise
Support has been our go-to destination for all queries when we\u2019re building
something new or maintaining and enhancing existing functions,\u201d says Rakshit
Daga, chief technology officer at BigBasket. \u201cGiven the breadth of AWS
solutions we use, we have questions on all kinds of topics, and Enterprise Support
connects us to the right person quickly.\u201d"
"The company had already begun shifting to asynchronous work queues in 2018,
isolating workloads into containers and breaking up its monolithic architecture.
However, the onset of the 2020 lockdown shifted this process into high gear. By
mid-2020, the company was fully containerized with 60 microservices running on
Kubernetes."
"Gourmeat Boosts Efficiency and Productivity by 40% on Amazon Lightsail"
"2021"
"Gourmeat, a meat boutique founded in Uruguay and with US operations in Miami,
Florida, was using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to manage isolated inventories
manually, but this time-consuming process was hampering its growth. "
"Looking to modernize its data solution, Gourmeat turned to Amazon Web Services
(AWS) and AWS Select Consulting Partner Nub8. Within weeks, the company had a new
inventory management system hosted on Amazon Lightsail, a simple-to-use virtual
private server that offers everything needed to build a web application. Gourmeat\
u2019s integrated cloud-based inventory application reduces time spent on inventory
management, maintains reliable and secure data, and enables key decision makers in
the company to have simultaneous data access."
"Gourmeat storefront"
"kr_quotemark"
"Once we started using the solution built on Amazon Lightsail, inventory management
and report creation went from approximately 4 hours a week to less than 20
minutes.\u201d"
"Lucia Albanell"
"CEO and cofounder, Gourmeat"
"Moving to Integrated Inventory Management"
"Founded in 2013, Gourmeat sells hormone- and antibiotic-free meat online and in
stores in Uruguay and Miami. Before turning to AWS and Nub8, Gourmeat managed
inventory through manual reports from its vendors. \u201cThe old system used
isolated applications, and it didn\u2019t enable simultaneous access for decision
makers across the company,\u201d says Lucia Albanell, CEO and cofounder of
Gourmeat. \u201cThis resulted in inefficiencies and low confidence in data
quality.\u201d "
"Pearson Boosts Security and Productivity Using Amazon Elasticsearch Service"
"2020"
"Global educational media company Pearson needed a more efficient way to analyze
and gain insights from its log data. With a number of teams in various locations
using Elasticsearch\u2014the popular open-source tool for search and log analytics\
u2014Pearson found that keeping track of log data and managing updates led to high
operating costs. Faced with this, as well as increasingly complex security log
management and analysis, the company found a solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Pearson quickly saw improvements by migrating from its self-managed open-source
Elasticsearch architecture to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, a fully managed service
that makes it easy to deploy, secure, and run Elasticsearch cost effectively at
scale. Rather than spending considerable time and resources on managing the
Elasticsearch clusters on its own, Pearson used the managed Amazon Elasticsearch
Service as part of its initiative to modernize its products. "
"Shot of two young women using a laptop together in a college library"
"kr_quotemark"
"As we migrate to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, we can start to focus on what\
u2019s necessary from a security perspective. We can bring in different skill sets
and focus on what\u2019s more important to the company rather than just maintaining
standard hardware or infrastructure.\u201d "
"Muthu Meyyappan"
"VP of Security Engineering and Product Security Officer, Pearson"
"Meeting the Needs of the Modern World"
"As one of the largest and oldest educational companies in the world, Pearson
operates in 70 different countries. The company provides a wide variety of
educational content and assessments and other services, which are often specialized
for different target audiences. As the company moved toward digitization in the
cloud, it began to use AWS services. At first, Pearson used Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2)\u2014a web service that provides secure, resizable compute
capacity in the cloud\u2014to power its self-managed open-source Elasticsearch. But
the company found that a self-managed approach posed several challenges. \u201cOne
of the major issues we had was with the security portion of the fine-grained access
control\u2014we weren\u2019t able to work through that,\u201d says Muthu Meyyappan,
vice president of security engineering and product security officer for Pearson. \
u201cAnother challenge was maintaining the upgrades and the usual service
management below the line, which consumed the effort of a full-time engineer to
maintain the platform.\u201d"
"In order to iron out its access control to log data and reduce the amount of time
spent on updates, Pearson turned to Amazon Elasticsearch Service. \u201cWhen we
were updating the open-source Elasticsearch, it took time to make sure we didn\
u2019t miss any data,\u201d says Meyyappan. \u201cWe were looking to have someone
else take that accountability. If there is data lost, for example, Amazon
Elasticsearch Service enables us to go back 14 days and get the index back.
Features like that encouraged us to migrate to the managed service.\u201d"
"TestWe Turns to AWS to Drive Global Expansion"
"2021"
"In 2014, colleagues Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier and Charles Zhu came across a study
that indicated 95 percent of European students owned laptops. However, educational
institutions continued to rely on paper-based exams. That\u2019s when R\u00e9gnier
and Zhu decided to launch TestWe, a platform for administering in-class and remote
computer-based assessments. \u201cStudents were using their devices for taking
notes, research, and sending emails,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cIt only made
sense for them to use their laptops to take exams as well.\u201d"
"The TestWe solution gives students the ability to take exams securely, in the
classroom or at home. Educational institutions can administer digital exams while
eliminating the possibility of students getting help from online resources or other
people since the tests are taken offline and recorded by a camera. The TestWe exam
process runs in the cloud and can be fully integrated into a school\u2019s learning
management system. Additionally, the tests can run directly on any type of student
devices."
"Today, TestWe is available in seven different languages and used in countries
throughout Western Europe as well as in North and South America. Every year, TestWe
helps teachers create millions of test questions."
"Student studies outside"
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS services enhances our credibility. Partners and customers know our tests
will run reliably and scale easily.\u201d"
"Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier"
"Cofounder and Chief Commercial Officer, TestWe"
"Global Expansion Requires Greater Firepower in the Cloud"
"In the early years of the company, TestWe relied on a regional cloud-platform
provider to host its applications. The company then began to expand to markets
throughout Western Europe and into Canada and South America. R\u00e9gnier and Zhu
soon realized they needed to migrate their testing applications to a provider with
global capabilities\u2014one that could deliver applications from local regional
data centers. \u201cWe wanted to ensure students, teachers, and administrators
continued to experience fast performance when interacting with the tests, no matter
where they are located,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cAnd with a larger customer
base, we needed to make sure our cloud infrastructure could handle spikes in
activity.\u201d"
"University of Oxford Introduces a Sector-Leading Image Recognition ML Prototype to
Augment Digitization in Numismatics"
"2021"
"The University of Oxford houses 21 million objects in the collections of its
Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM)\u2014artifacts and specimens that are among the
world\u2019s most significant. One aspect of GLAM\u2019s mission is to preserve
these assets and make them accessible to the world for education and research.
However, the organization has only enough space to display about 10 percent of its
holdings at a time, and there\u2019s an enormous backlog of artifacts still waiting
to be cataloged. To tackle that obstacle, GLAM used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to
build an enhanced image recognition system that would help accelerate the process
of cataloging artifacts."
"The Gardens and Museums IT team used Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service
that provides developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and
deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. Powered by Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, the models were trained and deployed at low cost to
automatically catalog the extensive coin collection of the Ashmolean Museum\
u2014which is the United Kingdom\u2019s first public museum and the world\u2019s
first university museum. On AWS, the image recognition system identifies and
catalogs coins in a fraction of the time it would take human volunteers to complete
the same task."
"Exterior of the Ashmolean Museum."
"kr_quotemark"
"I thought this project would be complex and time consuming, but using AWS made it
easy.\u201d"
"Anjanesh Babu"
"Systems Architect and Network Manager, Gardens and Museums IT, University of
Oxford's Gardens, Libraries & Museums"
"Updating Infrastructure and Creating an ML-Based Cataloging System on AWS"
"GLAM comprises four museums\u2014the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, the
Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the
History of Science Museum\u2014as well as the Bodleian Libraries and the Oxford
Botanic Garden & Harcourt Arboretum. In 2019, GLAM saw 900,000 visitors to its
digital collections. Its 21 million objects include live specimens and plants,
historical artifacts, and even images of objects that were damaged, lost, or
returned to collectors. \u201cFor many years, the museums were not overly active at
investing in and managing the information technology infrastructure that underpins
all our digital services,\u201d says Anjanesh Babu, systems architect and network
manager at Gardens and Museums IT. \u201cAfter years of underinvestment in outdated
infrastructure, the University of Oxford brought together a strategic focus on
digital transformation through the GLAM Digital program.\u201d As part of this
program, the Digital Estate Improvement project was the foundational part to
deliver root and branch improvements to the infrastructure to make it fit to meet
the digital aspirations laid out in the objectives. In 2017, the project uploaded
60 TB of digital records to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object
storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance."
"UFE Mongolia Goes Online in 10 Days with AWS"
"2020"
"Pearson Boosts Security and Productivity Using Amazon Elasticsearch Service"
"2020"
"Global educational media company Pearson needed a more efficient way to analyze
and gain insights from its log data. With a number of teams in various locations
using Elasticsearch\u2014the popular open-source tool for search and log analytics\
u2014Pearson found that keeping track of log data and managing updates led to high
operating costs. Faced with this, as well as increasingly complex security log
management and analysis, the company found a solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Pearson quickly saw improvements by migrating from its self-managed open-source
Elasticsearch architecture to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, a fully managed service
that makes it easy to deploy, secure, and run Elasticsearch cost effectively at
scale. Rather than spending considerable time and resources on managing the
Elasticsearch clusters on its own, Pearson used the managed Amazon Elasticsearch
Service as part of its initiative to modernize its products. "
"Shot of two young women using a laptop together in a college library"
"kr_quotemark"
"As we migrate to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, we can start to focus on what\
u2019s necessary from a security perspective. We can bring in different skill sets
and focus on what\u2019s more important to the company rather than just maintaining
standard hardware or infrastructure.\u201d "
"Muthu Meyyappan"
"VP of Security Engineering and Product Security Officer, Pearson"
"Meeting the Needs of the Modern World"
"As one of the largest and oldest educational companies in the world, Pearson
operates in 70 different countries. The company provides a wide variety of
educational content and assessments and other services, which are often specialized
for different target audiences. As the company moved toward digitization in the
cloud, it began to use AWS services. At first, Pearson used Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2)\u2014a web service that provides secure, resizable compute
capacity in the cloud\u2014to power its self-managed open-source Elasticsearch. But
the company found that a self-managed approach posed several challenges. \u201cOne
of the major issues we had was with the security portion of the fine-grained access
control\u2014we weren\u2019t able to work through that,\u201d says Muthu Meyyappan,
vice president of security engineering and product security officer for Pearson. \
u201cAnother challenge was maintaining the upgrades and the usual service
management below the line, which consumed the effort of a full-time engineer to
maintain the platform.\u201d"
"In order to iron out its access control to log data and reduce the amount of time
spent on updates, Pearson turned to Amazon Elasticsearch Service. \u201cWhen we
were updating the open-source Elasticsearch, it took time to make sure we didn\
u2019t miss any data,\u201d says Meyyappan. \u201cWe were looking to have someone
else take that accountability. If there is data lost, for example, Amazon
Elasticsearch Service enables us to go back 14 days and get the index back.
Features like that encouraged us to migrate to the managed service.\u201d"
"TestWe Turns to AWS to Drive Global Expansion"
"2021"
"In 2014, colleagues Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier and Charles Zhu came across a study
that indicated 95 percent of European students owned laptops. However, educational
institutions continued to rely on paper-based exams. That\u2019s when R\u00e9gnier
and Zhu decided to launch TestWe, a platform for administering in-class and remote
computer-based assessments. \u201cStudents were using their devices for taking
notes, research, and sending emails,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cIt only made
sense for them to use their laptops to take exams as well.\u201d"
"The TestWe solution gives students the ability to take exams securely, in the
classroom or at home. Educational institutions can administer digital exams while
eliminating the possibility of students getting help from online resources or other
people since the tests are taken offline and recorded by a camera. The TestWe exam
process runs in the cloud and can be fully integrated into a school\u2019s learning
management system. Additionally, the tests can run directly on any type of student
devices."
"Today, TestWe is available in seven different languages and used in countries
throughout Western Europe as well as in North and South America. Every year, TestWe
helps teachers create millions of test questions."
"Student studies outside"
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS services enhances our credibility. Partners and customers know our tests
will run reliably and scale easily.\u201d"
"Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier"
"Cofounder and Chief Commercial Officer, TestWe"
"Global Expansion Requires Greater Firepower in the Cloud"
"In the early years of the company, TestWe relied on a regional cloud-platform
provider to host its applications. The company then began to expand to markets
throughout Western Europe and into Canada and South America. R\u00e9gnier and Zhu
soon realized they needed to migrate their testing applications to a provider with
global capabilities\u2014one that could deliver applications from local regional
data centers. \u201cWe wanted to ensure students, teachers, and administrators
continued to experience fast performance when interacting with the tests, no matter
where they are located,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cAnd with a larger customer
base, we needed to make sure our cloud infrastructure could handle spikes in
activity.\u201d"
"University of Oxford Introduces a Sector-Leading Image Recognition ML Prototype to
Augment Digitization in Numismatics"
"2021"
"The University of Oxford houses 21 million objects in the collections of its
Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM)\u2014artifacts and specimens that are among the
world\u2019s most significant. One aspect of GLAM\u2019s mission is to preserve
these assets and make them accessible to the world for education and research.
However, the organization has only enough space to display about 10 percent of its
holdings at a time, and there\u2019s an enormous backlog of artifacts still waiting
to be cataloged. To tackle that obstacle, GLAM used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to
build an enhanced image recognition system that would help accelerate the process
of cataloging artifacts."
"The Gardens and Museums IT team used Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service
that provides developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and
deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. Powered by Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, the models were trained and deployed at low cost to
automatically catalog the extensive coin collection of the Ashmolean Museum\
u2014which is the United Kingdom\u2019s first public museum and the world\u2019s
first university museum. On AWS, the image recognition system identifies and
catalogs coins in a fraction of the time it would take human volunteers to complete
the same task."
"Exterior of the Ashmolean Museum."
"kr_quotemark"
"I thought this project would be complex and time consuming, but using AWS made it
easy.\u201d"
"Anjanesh Babu"
"Systems Architect and Network Manager, Gardens and Museums IT, University of
Oxford's Gardens, Libraries & Museums"
"Updating Infrastructure and Creating an ML-Based Cataloging System on AWS"
"GLAM comprises four museums\u2014the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, the
Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the
History of Science Museum\u2014as well as the Bodleian Libraries and the Oxford
Botanic Garden & Harcourt Arboretum. In 2019, GLAM saw 900,000 visitors to its
digital collections. Its 21 million objects include live specimens and plants,
historical artifacts, and even images of objects that were damaged, lost, or
returned to collectors. \u201cFor many years, the museums were not overly active at
investing in and managing the information technology infrastructure that underpins
all our digital services,\u201d says Anjanesh Babu, systems architect and network
manager at Gardens and Museums IT. \u201cAfter years of underinvestment in outdated
infrastructure, the University of Oxford brought together a strategic focus on
digital transformation through the GLAM Digital program.\u201d As part of this
program, the Digital Estate Improvement project was the foundational part to
deliver root and branch improvements to the infrastructure to make it fit to meet
the digital aspirations laid out in the objectives. In 2017, the project uploaded
60 TB of digital records to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object
storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance."
"UFE Mongolia Goes Online in 10 Days with AWS"
"2020"
"UFE-Mongolia_Customer-Reference_Image"
"kr_quotemark"
"The University had years and years of content. The challenge was how to move it to
the new system. Using AWS, it took us only three days.\u201d"
"Ankhtuya Dorisuren"
"Vice President, UFE"
"Founded in 1924, the University of Finance and Economics (UFE) is one of the
oldest educational institutions in Mongolia.It has over 6,000 students and more
than 300 employees and has successfully been running some online courses using on-
premises technology since 2015. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, UFE
used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to move all teaching online in less than two weeks,
enabling students to continue their studies remotely."
"On-Premises Infrastructure Not Up to the Job"
"At the beginning of 2020, UFE was using a local data center with two local
servers. But when more than 400 students tried to access it at once, the system was
overloaded, resulting in the entire learning management system going offline. The
local power supply was unreliable and the server would need to be restarted
manually after every power outage. Ankhtuya Dorisuren, UFE vice president,
explains: \u201cThis made it really difficult for students taking courses who lived
in the countryside and needed to access resources and teaching remotely.\u201d "
"In late January, the government of Mongolia announced a nationwide lockdown with
strict quarantine measures. All educational institutions closed within the space of
a week and overseas students were recalled home. This presented UFE with a problem:
how to continue providing all students with top-quality teaching while complying
with the lockdown restrictions. The speed of implementation was critical, as was
the need for an accessible and reliable system. UFE decided to transfer its entire
online learning management system to AWS cloud-based infrastructure\u2014and did so
within just 10-days."
"Uchi.ru Takes Lockdown Schoolchildren Online with AWS"
"2021"
"Uchi.ru became a first responder for education, keeping students learning, when
COVID-19 hit. The company provides school-age learning services around the world,
including Asia, Canada, Latin America, Russia, South Africa, and the USA.
Originally designed for use in the classroom and for extracurricular self-
education, its services employ an engaging, gamified approach to enhance
education."
"When the pandemic took hold, schools were shut down and the company found itself
having to provide remote learning for a much larger student audience. It rapidly
introduced new free services for schools, children, and teachers, providing large-
scale informational, methodological support for its school communities."
"The company soon found that its co-located servers were unable to cope with a
massive increase in usage, with more than 240,000 users now on the site at once,
compared to around 60,000 previously."
"Uchi.ru turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the urgent migration needed to
scale and meet the demand\u2014a migration that was achieved successfully and
quickly."
"Uchi-customer-references"
"kr_quotemark"
"The migration took three days. It wasn\u2019t business as usual and we were
outside our comfort zone, but it turned out to be fast, smooth, and practically
flawless in execution.\u201d"
"Alexey Vakhov"
"Chief Technical Officer, Uchi.ru"
"Turning to the Cloud to Cope with Overnight Demand"
"As the sector\u2019s largest educational technology provider, Uchi.ru had some
350,000 Russian speakers access its classroom services at least once a day at the
beginning of 2020. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, all schools closed with
little notice."
"The Uchi.ru team responded rapidly, introducing new distance-learning tools and
services to support students and teachers. They found extremely high demand for
distance learning and as a result, Uchi.ru was on the front line of education
provision, no longer an adjunct but of primary importance to the whole school-age
education system."
"Pomelo Fashion Enhances Shoppers\u2019 Experience, Increases Revenue Using Amazon
Personalize"
"2021"
"Pomelo Fashion, a global fashion e-commerce service based in Southeast Asia, had
been displaying items on its website in much the same way since it was founded in
2013. The setup had grown stale, not to mention that the algorithm for displaying
the items relied on old data streams with limited inputs and spotty accuracy. So as
a fast-growing, innovative startup, Pomelo Fashion set out to create personalized
customer experiences that would improve the discoverability of new items and
increase revenue\u2014and it needed a solution that would do so at scale. "
"Pomelo Fashion turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and used Amazon Personalize,
which enables developers to build applications with the same machine learning (ML)
technology used by Amazon.com for real-time personalized recommendations. By using
Amazon Personalize\u2014and the services of AWS Advanced Technology Partners
Segment and Braze\u2014to build fresh sorting and categorizing features, Pomelo
Fashion created a unique, personalized shopping experience that boosts customer
engagement and more efficiently converts it into sales."
"Smiling attractive young african woman"
"kr_quotemark"
"When you think of e-commerce, you think of AWS. New services are always coming out
on AWS, and support is very good.\u201d"
"Shane Leese"
"Business Intelligence Director, Pomelo Fashion"
"Updating a Years-Old Algorithm Using Amazon Personalize"
"Pomelo Fashion sells apparel online and in 18 retail locations throughout
Southeast Asia. Shipping to nearly two million customers in more than 50 countries,
the company currently employs 500 staff members across its corporate offices,
retail stores, and warehouses. Its gross revenue tripled from 2017 to 2018, doubled
from 2018 to 2019, and is on track to double in 2020 despite the overall global
economy being down\u2014in July 2020 alone, the company reported $7.5 million in
revenue. For years, Pomelo Fashion relied on an algorithm that ranked products on
category pages\u2014such as \u201cDresses,\u201d \u201cBlouses,\u201d and \
u201cPants & Bottoms\u201d\u2014based on page views and sales, blending the trends
of the past 30 days with lifetime behaviors, product price, and newest releases.
The rank was calculated daily and stored in a database, providing an identical
experience for every user by country. "
"Neiman Marcus Increases New Application Speed to Market by 50% on AWS, Improves
Digital Selling for Associates"
"2021"
"A luxury household name, Neiman Marcus has a reputation for delivering a first-
class, personalized customer service experience. To modernize and enhance that
experience, the company wanted to develop Connect, an omnichannel digital selling
application that would empower associates to view rich, personalized customer
information with the goal of making each customer interaction unforgettable. When
the COVID-19 pandemic forced many retail stores to close, the company\u2019s sales
moved exclusively online. To continue providing the hallmark experience that had
always attracted customers, Neiman Marcus needed to launch Connect quickly to
enable associates to perform digital selling. "
"Choosing a serverless architecture with mobile development solutions on Amazon Web
Services (AWS) enabled the development team to launch the app much faster than in
the 4 months it had originally planned. \u201cUsing AWS cloud-native and serverless
technologies, we increased our speed to market by at least 50 percent and were able
to accelerate the launch of Connect,\u201d says Sriram Vaidyanathan, senior
director of omni engineering at Neiman Marcus. This approach also greatly reduced
app-building costs and provided developers with more agility for the development
and rapid deployment of updates. The app elastically scales to support traffic at
any volume for greater cost efficiency, and it has increased"
"associate productivity."
"Female sales associate peruses clothing rack. "
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS Amplify on a serverless architecture cost us 90 percent less than if we
had built the app using a more traditional method. This is a huge win for us.\
u201d"
"Hemanth Jayaraman"
"Senior Director of Cloud Engineering, Neiman Marcus"
"Empowering Associates to Elevate the Customer Experience"
"Neiman Marcus is the flagship brand of the Neiman Marcus Group, a luxury retail
organization founded in 1907 and generating $2.6 billion in annual revenue from its
subsidiaries. Before Neiman Marcus developed Connect, associates were using an
assortment of tools and technologies to provide customer service. Each solution
provided a"
"different piece of information an associate needed to generate a sale. Some of
these solutions were outdated, and all of them were creating friction. As a result,
they were increasing sell times and decreasing associate productivity."
"AWS for Industries"
"AWS is How: HelloFresh Delivers a Personalized Experience to Millions of Customers
Around the World"
"by Ed Jimenez | on 21 MAY 2021 | in Amazon EMR, Amazon Simple Storage Services
(S3), Industries, Retail | Permalink | Comments | Share"
"Mealtimes are important sources of connection, comfort, and self-care. And though
we all have different lifestyles and preferences, we tend to crave similar
qualities when it comes to food: variety, novelty, nutrition, convenience, and
great taste. In essence, great food experiences are personal experiences that offer
plenty of choice and flexibility."
"HelloFreshEnter HelloFresh, the most popular meal kit in the world. HelloFresh
provides fresh, healthy, affordable ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes that are
delivered straight to your door. The company also operates a lean and innovative
supply chain designed to eliminate food waste, reduce carbon emissions, optimize
packaging, and favor local ingredient sourcing. With operations in 14 countries,
HelloFresh delivered more than 600 million meals to 5.3 million active customers
last year, providing organized, preportioned meal kits tailored to serve different
household sizes, schedules, and tastes. The HelloFresh approach to meeting diverse
needs, creating new menu options, and providing convenient delivery to each home it
serves depends on two crucial ingredients: maintaining a deep understanding of its
customers and staying agile across every aspect of its business, including product
development, production, and distribution."
"This is why HelloFresh uses Amazon Web Services (AWS). With AWS, HelloFresh gets a
reliable, global cloud infrastructure that easily scales to support the company\
u2019s growth around the world. With the help of AWS consultation and expertise,
HelloFresh has modernized its data capabilities, moving from its legacy database to
a data lake where it can centralize storage of both structured and unstructured
data. This makes it easier for HelloFresh to bring together information from
multiple data sources and use analytics tools to gather insights that it can use to
improve its services and create new offerings for customers. Using AWS, HelloFresh
maintains a closer connection to changing customer preferences and the flexibility
to quickly adapt its meal offerings and delivery services."
"HelloFresh runs much of its data management on Amazon Simple Storage Service
(Amazon S3), a service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance. It also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon
RDS) for automating time-consuming administration tasks related to database
management, such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.
Also important to HelloFresh data management is Amazon EMR, a big data platform
that makes it easier to process vast amounts of data using open source tools."
"See how HelloFresh is using AWS to deliver personalized customer experiences in
the new \u201cAWS Is How\u201d campaign. Learn how retail companies can use AWS to
build solutions that enhance customer experiences and deliver insights that improve
operations."
"BigBasket Grows Bigger with 400,000 Daily Orders on AWS"
"2021"
"Traffic Spikes Sixfold during Lockdown"
"The online grocery market in India is competitive and value-driven, with some 20
companies vying for shoppers in a market that\u2019s expected to hit $10.5 billion
by 2023. The central government\u2019s development of smart cities includes
infrastructure to support the growth of ecommerce, and many large companies are
making plays to get in on the action."
"BigBasket, India\u2019s largest online grocery, has been in business since 2011.
Customer retention is at the heart of its strategy, as well as a hyper-local
approach to inventory. BigBasket is available in 21 cities and runs its
infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The business had been
growing 20\u201330 percent each year, but when COVID-19 struck and India went into
lockdown, BigBasket faced unprecedented demand. Daily traffic was suddenly six
times higher than pre\u2013COVID-19 peaks."
"Big Basket"
"kr_quotemark"
"With AWS, we have all the pieces of the puzzle to smoothly run a large ecommerce
architecture."
"Rakshit Daga"
"Chief Technology Officer, BigBasket"
" "
"Microservices and Containers Boost Efficiency"
"BigBasket subscribes to AWS Enterprise Support and immediately consulted with the
AWS team for advice on scaling its architecture efficiently. \u201cAWS Enterprise
Support has been our go-to destination for all queries when we\u2019re building
something new or maintaining and enhancing existing functions,\u201d says Rakshit
Daga, chief technology officer at BigBasket. \u201cGiven the breadth of AWS
solutions we use, we have questions on all kinds of topics, and Enterprise Support
connects us to the right person quickly.\u201d"
"The company had already begun shifting to asynchronous work queues in 2018,
isolating workloads into containers and breaking up its monolithic architecture.
However, the onset of the 2020 lockdown shifted this process into high gear. By
mid-2020, the company was fully containerized with 60 microservices running on
Kubernetes."
"Gourmeat Boosts Efficiency and Productivity by 40% on Amazon Lightsail"
"2021"
"Gourmeat, a meat boutique founded in Uruguay and with US operations in Miami,
Florida, was using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to manage isolated inventories
manually, but this time-consuming process was hampering its growth. "
"Looking to modernize its data solution, Gourmeat turned to Amazon Web Services
(AWS) and AWS Select Consulting Partner Nub8. Within weeks, the company had a new
inventory management system hosted on Amazon Lightsail, a simple-to-use virtual
private server that offers everything needed to build a web application. Gourmeat\
u2019s integrated cloud-based inventory application reduces time spent on inventory
management, maintains reliable and secure data, and enables key decision makers in
the company to have simultaneous data access."
"Gourmeat storefront"
"kr_quotemark"
"Once we started using the solution built on Amazon Lightsail, inventory management
and report creation went from approximately 4 hours a week to less than 20
minutes.\u201d"
"Lucia Albanell"
"CEO and cofounder, Gourmeat"
"Moving to Integrated Inventory Management"
"Founded in 2013, Gourmeat sells hormone- and antibiotic-free meat online and in
stores in Uruguay and Miami. Before turning to AWS and Nub8, Gourmeat managed
inventory through manual reports from its vendors. \u201cThe old system used
isolated applications, and it didn\u2019t enable simultaneous access for decision
makers across the company,\u201d says Lucia Albanell, CEO and cofounder of
Gourmeat. \u201cThis resulted in inefficiencies and low confidence in data
quality.\u201d "
"Pearson Boosts Security and Productivity Using Amazon Elasticsearch Service"
"2020"
"Global educational media company Pearson needed a more efficient way to analyze
and gain insights from its log data. With a number of teams in various locations
using Elasticsearch\u2014the popular open-source tool for search and log analytics\
u2014Pearson found that keeping track of log data and managing updates led to high
operating costs. Faced with this, as well as increasingly complex security log
management and analysis, the company found a solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Pearson quickly saw improvements by migrating from its self-managed open-source
Elasticsearch architecture to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, a fully managed service
that makes it easy to deploy, secure, and run Elasticsearch cost effectively at
scale. Rather than spending considerable time and resources on managing the
Elasticsearch clusters on its own, Pearson used the managed Amazon Elasticsearch
Service as part of its initiative to modernize its products. "
"Shot of two young women using a laptop together in a college library"
"kr_quotemark"
"As we migrate to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, we can start to focus on what\
u2019s necessary from a security perspective. We can bring in different skill sets
and focus on what\u2019s more important to the company rather than just maintaining
standard hardware or infrastructure.\u201d "
"Muthu Meyyappan"
"VP of Security Engineering and Product Security Officer, Pearson"
"Meeting the Needs of the Modern World"
"As one of the largest and oldest educational companies in the world, Pearson
operates in 70 different countries. The company provides a wide variety of
educational content and assessments and other services, which are often specialized
for different target audiences. As the company moved toward digitization in the
cloud, it began to use AWS services. At first, Pearson used Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2)\u2014a web service that provides secure, resizable compute
capacity in the cloud\u2014to power its self-managed open-source Elasticsearch. But
the company found that a self-managed approach posed several challenges. \u201cOne
of the major issues we had was with the security portion of the fine-grained access
control\u2014we weren\u2019t able to work through that,\u201d says Muthu Meyyappan,
vice president of security engineering and product security officer for Pearson. \
u201cAnother challenge was maintaining the upgrades and the usual service
management below the line, which consumed the effort of a full-time engineer to
maintain the platform.\u201d"
"In order to iron out its access control to log data and reduce the amount of time
spent on updates, Pearson turned to Amazon Elasticsearch Service. \u201cWhen we
were updating the open-source Elasticsearch, it took time to make sure we didn\
u2019t miss any data,\u201d says Meyyappan. \u201cWe were looking to have someone
else take that accountability. If there is data lost, for example, Amazon
Elasticsearch Service enables us to go back 14 days and get the index back.
Features like that encouraged us to migrate to the managed service.\u201d"
"TestWe Turns to AWS to Drive Global Expansion"
"2021"
"In 2014, colleagues Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier and Charles Zhu came across a study
that indicated 95 percent of European students owned laptops. However, educational
institutions continued to rely on paper-based exams. That\u2019s when R\u00e9gnier
and Zhu decided to launch TestWe, a platform for administering in-class and remote
computer-based assessments. \u201cStudents were using their devices for taking
notes, research, and sending emails,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cIt only made
sense for them to use their laptops to take exams as well.\u201d"
"The TestWe solution gives students the ability to take exams securely, in the
classroom or at home. Educational institutions can administer digital exams while
eliminating the possibility of students getting help from online resources or other
people since the tests are taken offline and recorded by a camera. The TestWe exam
process runs in the cloud and can be fully integrated into a school\u2019s learning
management system. Additionally, the tests can run directly on any type of student
devices."
"Today, TestWe is available in seven different languages and used in countries
throughout Western Europe as well as in North and South America. Every year, TestWe
helps teachers create millions of test questions."
"Student studies outside"
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS services enhances our credibility. Partners and customers know our tests
will run reliably and scale easily.\u201d"
"Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier"
"Cofounder and Chief Commercial Officer, TestWe"
"Global Expansion Requires Greater Firepower in the Cloud"
"In the early years of the company, TestWe relied on a regional cloud-platform
provider to host its applications. The company then began to expand to markets
throughout Western Europe and into Canada and South America. R\u00e9gnier and Zhu
soon realized they needed to migrate their testing applications to a provider with
global capabilities\u2014one that could deliver applications from local regional
data centers. \u201cWe wanted to ensure students, teachers, and administrators
continued to experience fast performance when interacting with the tests, no matter
where they are located,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cAnd with a larger customer
base, we needed to make sure our cloud infrastructure could handle spikes in
activity.\u201d"
"University of Oxford Introduces a Sector-Leading Image Recognition ML Prototype to
Augment Digitization in Numismatics"
"2021"
"The University of Oxford houses 21 million objects in the collections of its
Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM)\u2014artifacts and specimens that are among the
world\u2019s most significant. One aspect of GLAM\u2019s mission is to preserve
these assets and make them accessible to the world for education and research.
However, the organization has only enough space to display about 10 percent of its
holdings at a time, and there\u2019s an enormous backlog of artifacts still waiting
to be cataloged. To tackle that obstacle, GLAM used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to
build an enhanced image recognition system that would help accelerate the process
of cataloging artifacts."
"The Gardens and Museums IT team used Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service
that provides developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and
deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. Powered by Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, the models were trained and deployed at low cost to
automatically catalog the extensive coin collection of the Ashmolean Museum\
u2014which is the United Kingdom\u2019s first public museum and the world\u2019s
first university museum. On AWS, the image recognition system identifies and
catalogs coins in a fraction of the time it would take human volunteers to complete
the same task."
"Exterior of the Ashmolean Museum."
"kr_quotemark"
"I thought this project would be complex and time consuming, but using AWS made it
easy.\u201d"
"Anjanesh Babu"
"Systems Architect and Network Manager, Gardens and Museums IT, University of
Oxford's Gardens, Libraries & Museums"
"Updating Infrastructure and Creating an ML-Based Cataloging System on AWS"
"GLAM comprises four museums\u2014the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, the
Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the
History of Science Museum\u2014as well as the Bodleian Libraries and the Oxford
Botanic Garden & Harcourt Arboretum. In 2019, GLAM saw 900,000 visitors to its
digital collections. Its 21 million objects include live specimens and plants,
historical artifacts, and even images of objects that were damaged, lost, or
returned to collectors. \u201cFor many years, the museums were not overly active at
investing in and managing the information technology infrastructure that underpins
all our digital services,\u201d says Anjanesh Babu, systems architect and network
manager at Gardens and Museums IT. \u201cAfter years of underinvestment in outdated
infrastructure, the University of Oxford brought together a strategic focus on
digital transformation through the GLAM Digital program.\u201d As part of this
program, the Digital Estate Improvement project was the foundational part to
deliver root and branch improvements to the infrastructure to make it fit to meet
the digital aspirations laid out in the objectives. In 2017, the project uploaded
60 TB of digital records to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object
storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance."
"UFE Mongolia Goes Online in 10 Days with AWS"
"2020"
"Pearson Boosts Security and Productivity Using Amazon Elasticsearch Service"
"2020"
"Global educational media company Pearson needed a more efficient way to analyze
and gain insights from its log data. With a number of teams in various locations
using Elasticsearch\u2014the popular open-source tool for search and log analytics\
u2014Pearson found that keeping track of log data and managing updates led to high
operating costs. Faced with this, as well as increasingly complex security log
management and analysis, the company found a solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Pearson quickly saw improvements by migrating from its self-managed open-source
Elasticsearch architecture to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, a fully managed service
that makes it easy to deploy, secure, and run Elasticsearch cost effectively at
scale. Rather than spending considerable time and resources on managing the
Elasticsearch clusters on its own, Pearson used the managed Amazon Elasticsearch
Service as part of its initiative to modernize its products. "
"Shot of two young women using a laptop together in a college library"
"kr_quotemark"
"As we migrate to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, we can start to focus on what\
u2019s necessary from a security perspective. We can bring in different skill sets
and focus on what\u2019s more important to the company rather than just maintaining
standard hardware or infrastructure.\u201d "
"Muthu Meyyappan"
"VP of Security Engineering and Product Security Officer, Pearson"
"Meeting the Needs of the Modern World"
"As one of the largest and oldest educational companies in the world, Pearson
operates in 70 different countries. The company provides a wide variety of
educational content and assessments and other services, which are often specialized
for different target audiences. As the company moved toward digitization in the
cloud, it began to use AWS services. At first, Pearson used Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2)\u2014a web service that provides secure, resizable compute
capacity in the cloud\u2014to power its self-managed open-source Elasticsearch. But
the company found that a self-managed approach posed several challenges. \u201cOne
of the major issues we had was with the security portion of the fine-grained access
control\u2014we weren\u2019t able to work through that,\u201d says Muthu Meyyappan,
vice president of security engineering and product security officer for Pearson. \
u201cAnother challenge was maintaining the upgrades and the usual service
management below the line, which consumed the effort of a full-time engineer to
maintain the platform.\u201d"
"In order to iron out its access control to log data and reduce the amount of time
spent on updates, Pearson turned to Amazon Elasticsearch Service. \u201cWhen we
were updating the open-source Elasticsearch, it took time to make sure we didn\
u2019t miss any data,\u201d says Meyyappan. \u201cWe were looking to have someone
else take that accountability. If there is data lost, for example, Amazon
Elasticsearch Service enables us to go back 14 days and get the index back.
Features like that encouraged us to migrate to the managed service.\u201d"
"TestWe Turns to AWS to Drive Global Expansion"
"2021"
"In 2014, colleagues Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier and Charles Zhu came across a study
that indicated 95 percent of European students owned laptops. However, educational
institutions continued to rely on paper-based exams. That\u2019s when R\u00e9gnier
and Zhu decided to launch TestWe, a platform for administering in-class and remote
computer-based assessments. \u201cStudents were using their devices for taking
notes, research, and sending emails,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cIt only made
sense for them to use their laptops to take exams as well.\u201d"
"The TestWe solution gives students the ability to take exams securely, in the
classroom or at home. Educational institutions can administer digital exams while
eliminating the possibility of students getting help from online resources or other
people since the tests are taken offline and recorded by a camera. The TestWe exam
process runs in the cloud and can be fully integrated into a school\u2019s learning
management system. Additionally, the tests can run directly on any type of student
devices."
"Today, TestWe is available in seven different languages and used in countries
throughout Western Europe as well as in North and South America. Every year, TestWe
helps teachers create millions of test questions."
"Student studies outside"
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS services enhances our credibility. Partners and customers know our tests
will run reliably and scale easily.\u201d"
"Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier"
"Cofounder and Chief Commercial Officer, TestWe"
"Global Expansion Requires Greater Firepower in the Cloud"
"In the early years of the company, TestWe relied on a regional cloud-platform
provider to host its applications. The company then began to expand to markets
throughout Western Europe and into Canada and South America. R\u00e9gnier and Zhu
soon realized they needed to migrate their testing applications to a provider with
global capabilities\u2014one that could deliver applications from local regional
data centers. \u201cWe wanted to ensure students, teachers, and administrators
continued to experience fast performance when interacting with the tests, no matter
where they are located,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cAnd with a larger customer
base, we needed to make sure our cloud infrastructure could handle spikes in
activity.\u201d"
"University of Oxford Introduces a Sector-Leading Image Recognition ML Prototype to
Augment Digitization in Numismatics"
"2021"
"The University of Oxford houses 21 million objects in the collections of its
Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM)\u2014artifacts and specimens that are among the
world\u2019s most significant. One aspect of GLAM\u2019s mission is to preserve
these assets and make them accessible to the world for education and research.
However, the organization has only enough space to display about 10 percent of its
holdings at a time, and there\u2019s an enormous backlog of artifacts still waiting
to be cataloged. To tackle that obstacle, GLAM used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to
build an enhanced image recognition system that would help accelerate the process
of cataloging artifacts."
"The Gardens and Museums IT team used Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service
that provides developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and
deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. Powered by Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, the models were trained and deployed at low cost to
automatically catalog the extensive coin collection of the Ashmolean Museum\
u2014which is the United Kingdom\u2019s first public museum and the world\u2019s
first university museum. On AWS, the image recognition system identifies and
catalogs coins in a fraction of the time it would take human volunteers to complete
the same task."
"Exterior of the Ashmolean Museum."
"kr_quotemark"
"I thought this project would be complex and time consuming, but using AWS made it
easy.\u201d"
"Anjanesh Babu"
"Systems Architect and Network Manager, Gardens and Museums IT, University of
Oxford's Gardens, Libraries & Museums"
"Updating Infrastructure and Creating an ML-Based Cataloging System on AWS"
"GLAM comprises four museums\u2014the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, the
Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the
History of Science Museum\u2014as well as the Bodleian Libraries and the Oxford
Botanic Garden & Harcourt Arboretum. In 2019, GLAM saw 900,000 visitors to its
digital collections. Its 21 million objects include live specimens and plants,
historical artifacts, and even images of objects that were damaged, lost, or
returned to collectors. \u201cFor many years, the museums were not overly active at
investing in and managing the information technology infrastructure that underpins
all our digital services,\u201d says Anjanesh Babu, systems architect and network
manager at Gardens and Museums IT. \u201cAfter years of underinvestment in outdated
infrastructure, the University of Oxford brought together a strategic focus on
digital transformation through the GLAM Digital program.\u201d As part of this
program, the Digital Estate Improvement project was the foundational part to
deliver root and branch improvements to the infrastructure to make it fit to meet
the digital aspirations laid out in the objectives. In 2017, the project uploaded
60 TB of digital records to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object
storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance."
"UFE Mongolia Goes Online in 10 Days with AWS"
"2020"
"UFE-Mongolia_Customer-Reference_Image"
"kr_quotemark"
"The University had years and years of content. The challenge was how to move it to
the new system. Using AWS, it took us only three days.\u201d"
"Ankhtuya Dorisuren"
"Vice President, UFE"
"Founded in 1924, the University of Finance and Economics (UFE) is one of the
oldest educational institutions in Mongolia.It has over 6,000 students and more
than 300 employees and has successfully been running some online courses using on-
premises technology since 2015. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, UFE
used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to move all teaching online in less than two weeks,
enabling students to continue their studies remotely."
"On-Premises Infrastructure Not Up to the Job"
"At the beginning of 2020, UFE was using a local data center with two local
servers. But when more than 400 students tried to access it at once, the system was
overloaded, resulting in the entire learning management system going offline. The
local power supply was unreliable and the server would need to be restarted
manually after every power outage. Ankhtuya Dorisuren, UFE vice president,
explains: \u201cThis made it really difficult for students taking courses who lived
in the countryside and needed to access resources and teaching remotely.\u201d "
"In late January, the government of Mongolia announced a nationwide lockdown with
strict quarantine measures. All educational institutions closed within the space of
a week and overseas students were recalled home. This presented UFE with a problem:
how to continue providing all students with top-quality teaching while complying
with the lockdown restrictions. The speed of implementation was critical, as was
the need for an accessible and reliable system. UFE decided to transfer its entire
online learning management system to AWS cloud-based infrastructure\u2014and did so
within just 10-days."
"Uchi.ru Takes Lockdown Schoolchildren Online with AWS"
"2021"
"Uchi.ru became a first responder for education, keeping students learning, when
COVID-19 hit. The company provides school-age learning services around the world,
including Asia, Canada, Latin America, Russia, South Africa, and the USA.
Originally designed for use in the classroom and for extracurricular self-
education, its services employ an engaging, gamified approach to enhance
education."
"When the pandemic took hold, schools were shut down and the company found itself
having to provide remote learning for a much larger student audience. It rapidly
introduced new free services for schools, children, and teachers, providing large-
scale informational, methodological support for its school communities."
"The company soon found that its co-located servers were unable to cope with a
massive increase in usage, with more than 240,000 users now on the site at once,
compared to around 60,000 previously."
"Uchi.ru turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the urgent migration needed to
scale and meet the demand\u2014a migration that was achieved successfully and
quickly."
"Uchi-customer-references"
"kr_quotemark"
"The migration took three days. It wasn\u2019t business as usual and we were
outside our comfort zone, but it turned out to be fast, smooth, and practically
flawless in execution.\u201d"
"Alexey Vakhov"
"Chief Technical Officer, Uchi.ru"
"Turning to the Cloud to Cope with Overnight Demand"
"As the sector\u2019s largest educational technology provider, Uchi.ru had some
350,000 Russian speakers access its classroom services at least once a day at the
beginning of 2020. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, all schools closed with
little notice."
"The Uchi.ru team responded rapidly, introducing new distance-learning tools and
services to support students and teachers. They found extremely high demand for
distance learning and as a result, Uchi.ru was on the front line of education
provision, no longer an adjunct but of primary importance to the whole school-age
education system."
"Pomelo Fashion Enhances Shoppers\u2019 Experience, Increases Revenue Using Amazon
Personalize"
"2021"
"Pomelo Fashion, a global fashion e-commerce service based in Southeast Asia, had
been displaying items on its website in much the same way since it was founded in
2013. The setup had grown stale, not to mention that the algorithm for displaying
the items relied on old data streams with limited inputs and spotty accuracy. So as
a fast-growing, innovative startup, Pomelo Fashion set out to create personalized
customer experiences that would improve the discoverability of new items and
increase revenue\u2014and it needed a solution that would do so at scale. "
"Pomelo Fashion turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and used Amazon Personalize,
which enables developers to build applications with the same machine learning (ML)
technology used by Amazon.com for real-time personalized recommendations. By using
Amazon Personalize\u2014and the services of AWS Advanced Technology Partners
Segment and Braze\u2014to build fresh sorting and categorizing features, Pomelo
Fashion created a unique, personalized shopping experience that boosts customer
engagement and more efficiently converts it into sales."
"Smiling attractive young african woman"
"kr_quotemark"
"When you think of e-commerce, you think of AWS. New services are always coming out
on AWS, and support is very good.\u201d"
"Shane Leese"
"Business Intelligence Director, Pomelo Fashion"
"Updating a Years-Old Algorithm Using Amazon Personalize"
"Pomelo Fashion sells apparel online and in 18 retail locations throughout
Southeast Asia. Shipping to nearly two million customers in more than 50 countries,
the company currently employs 500 staff members across its corporate offices,
retail stores, and warehouses. Its gross revenue tripled from 2017 to 2018, doubled
from 2018 to 2019, and is on track to double in 2020 despite the overall global
economy being down\u2014in July 2020 alone, the company reported $7.5 million in
revenue. For years, Pomelo Fashion relied on an algorithm that ranked products on
category pages\u2014such as \u201cDresses,\u201d \u201cBlouses,\u201d and \
u201cPants & Bottoms\u201d\u2014based on page views and sales, blending the trends
of the past 30 days with lifetime behaviors, product price, and newest releases.
The rank was calculated daily and stored in a database, providing an identical
experience for every user by country. "
"Neiman Marcus Increases New Application Speed to Market by 50% on AWS, Improves
Digital Selling for Associates"
"2021"
"A luxury household name, Neiman Marcus has a reputation for delivering a first-
class, personalized customer service experience. To modernize and enhance that
experience, the company wanted to develop Connect, an omnichannel digital selling
application that would empower associates to view rich, personalized customer
information with the goal of making each customer interaction unforgettable. When
the COVID-19 pandemic forced many retail stores to close, the company\u2019s sales
moved exclusively online. To continue providing the hallmark experience that had
always attracted customers, Neiman Marcus needed to launch Connect quickly to
enable associates to perform digital selling. "
"Choosing a serverless architecture with mobile development solutions on Amazon Web
Services (AWS) enabled the development team to launch the app much faster than in
the 4 months it had originally planned. \u201cUsing AWS cloud-native and serverless
technologies, we increased our speed to market by at least 50 percent and were able
to accelerate the launch of Connect,\u201d says Sriram Vaidyanathan, senior
director of omni engineering at Neiman Marcus. This approach also greatly reduced
app-building costs and provided developers with more agility for the development
and rapid deployment of updates. The app elastically scales to support traffic at
any volume for greater cost efficiency, and it has increased"
"associate productivity."
"Female sales associate peruses clothing rack. "
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS Amplify on a serverless architecture cost us 90 percent less than if we
had built the app using a more traditional method. This is a huge win for us.\
u201d"
"Hemanth Jayaraman"
"Senior Director of Cloud Engineering, Neiman Marcus"
"Empowering Associates to Elevate the Customer Experience"
"Neiman Marcus is the flagship brand of the Neiman Marcus Group, a luxury retail
organization founded in 1907 and generating $2.6 billion in annual revenue from its
subsidiaries. Before Neiman Marcus developed Connect, associates were using an
assortment of tools and technologies to provide customer service. Each solution
provided a"
"different piece of information an associate needed to generate a sale. Some of
these solutions were outdated, and all of them were creating friction. As a result,
they were increasing sell times and decreasing associate productivity."
"AWS for Industries"
"AWS is How: HelloFresh Delivers a Personalized Experience to Millions of Customers
Around the World"
"by Ed Jimenez | on 21 MAY 2021 | in Amazon EMR, Amazon Simple Storage Services
(S3), Industries, Retail | Permalink | Comments | Share"
"Mealtimes are important sources of connection, comfort, and self-care. And though
we all have different lifestyles and preferences, we tend to crave similar
qualities when it comes to food: variety, novelty, nutrition, convenience, and
great taste. In essence, great food experiences are personal experiences that offer
plenty of choice and flexibility."
"HelloFreshEnter HelloFresh, the most popular meal kit in the world. HelloFresh
provides fresh, healthy, affordable ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes that are
delivered straight to your door. The company also operates a lean and innovative
supply chain designed to eliminate food waste, reduce carbon emissions, optimize
packaging, and favor local ingredient sourcing. With operations in 14 countries,
HelloFresh delivered more than 600 million meals to 5.3 million active customers
last year, providing organized, preportioned meal kits tailored to serve different
household sizes, schedules, and tastes. The HelloFresh approach to meeting diverse
needs, creating new menu options, and providing convenient delivery to each home it
serves depends on two crucial ingredients: maintaining a deep understanding of its
customers and staying agile across every aspect of its business, including product
development, production, and distribution."
"This is why HelloFresh uses Amazon Web Services (AWS). With AWS, HelloFresh gets a
reliable, global cloud infrastructure that easily scales to support the company\
u2019s growth around the world. With the help of AWS consultation and expertise,
HelloFresh has modernized its data capabilities, moving from its legacy database to
a data lake where it can centralize storage of both structured and unstructured
data. This makes it easier for HelloFresh to bring together information from
multiple data sources and use analytics tools to gather insights that it can use to
improve its services and create new offerings for customers. Using AWS, HelloFresh
maintains a closer connection to changing customer preferences and the flexibility
to quickly adapt its meal offerings and delivery services."
"HelloFresh runs much of its data management on Amazon Simple Storage Service
(Amazon S3), a service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance. It also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon
RDS) for automating time-consuming administration tasks related to database
management, such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.
Also important to HelloFresh data management is Amazon EMR, a big data platform
that makes it easier to process vast amounts of data using open source tools."
"See how HelloFresh is using AWS to deliver personalized customer experiences in
the new \u201cAWS Is How\u201d campaign. Learn how retail companies can use AWS to
build solutions that enhance customer experiences and deliver insights that improve
operations."
"BigBasket Grows Bigger with 400,000 Daily Orders on AWS"
"2021"
"Traffic Spikes Sixfold during Lockdown"
"The online grocery market in India is competitive and value-driven, with some 20
companies vying for shoppers in a market that\u2019s expected to hit $10.5 billion
by 2023. The central government\u2019s development of smart cities includes
infrastructure to support the growth of ecommerce, and many large companies are
making plays to get in on the action."
"BigBasket, India\u2019s largest online grocery, has been in business since 2011.
Customer retention is at the heart of its strategy, as well as a hyper-local
approach to inventory. BigBasket is available in 21 cities and runs its
infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The business had been
growing 20\u201330 percent each year, but when COVID-19 struck and India went into
lockdown, BigBasket faced unprecedented demand. Daily traffic was suddenly six
times higher than pre\u2013COVID-19 peaks."
"Big Basket"
"kr_quotemark"
"With AWS, we have all the pieces of the puzzle to smoothly run a large ecommerce
architecture."
"Rakshit Daga"
"Chief Technology Officer, BigBasket"
" "
"Microservices and Containers Boost Efficiency"
"BigBasket subscribes to AWS Enterprise Support and immediately consulted with the
AWS team for advice on scaling its architecture efficiently. \u201cAWS Enterprise
Support has been our go-to destination for all queries when we\u2019re building
something new or maintaining and enhancing existing functions,\u201d says Rakshit
Daga, chief technology officer at BigBasket. \u201cGiven the breadth of AWS
solutions we use, we have questions on all kinds of topics, and Enterprise Support
connects us to the right person quickly.\u201d"
"The company had already begun shifting to asynchronous work queues in 2018,
isolating workloads into containers and breaking up its monolithic architecture.
However, the onset of the 2020 lockdown shifted this process into high gear. By
mid-2020, the company was fully containerized with 60 microservices running on
Kubernetes."
"Gourmeat Boosts Efficiency and Productivity by 40% on Amazon Lightsail"
"2021"
"Gourmeat, a meat boutique founded in Uruguay and with US operations in Miami,
Florida, was using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to manage isolated inventories
manually, but this time-consuming process was hampering its growth. "
"Looking to modernize its data solution, Gourmeat turned to Amazon Web Services
(AWS) and AWS Select Consulting Partner Nub8. Within weeks, the company had a new
inventory management system hosted on Amazon Lightsail, a simple-to-use virtual
private server that offers everything needed to build a web application. Gourmeat\
u2019s integrated cloud-based inventory application reduces time spent on inventory
management, maintains reliable and secure data, and enables key decision makers in
the company to have simultaneous data access."
"Gourmeat storefront"
"kr_quotemark"
"Once we started using the solution built on Amazon Lightsail, inventory management
and report creation went from approximately 4 hours a week to less than 20
minutes.\u201d"
"Lucia Albanell"
"CEO and cofounder, Gourmeat"
"Moving to Integrated Inventory Management"
"Founded in 2013, Gourmeat sells hormone- and antibiotic-free meat online and in
stores in Uruguay and Miami. Before turning to AWS and Nub8, Gourmeat managed
inventory through manual reports from its vendors. \u201cThe old system used
isolated applications, and it didn\u2019t enable simultaneous access for decision
makers across the company,\u201d says Lucia Albanell, CEO and cofounder of
Gourmeat. \u201cThis resulted in inefficiencies and low confidence in data
quality.\u201d "
"Pearson Boosts Security and Productivity Using Amazon Elasticsearch Service"
"2020"
"Global educational media company Pearson needed a more efficient way to analyze
and gain insights from its log data. With a number of teams in various locations
using Elasticsearch\u2014the popular open-source tool for search and log analytics\
u2014Pearson found that keeping track of log data and managing updates led to high
operating costs. Faced with this, as well as increasingly complex security log
management and analysis, the company found a solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Pearson quickly saw improvements by migrating from its self-managed open-source
Elasticsearch architecture to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, a fully managed service
that makes it easy to deploy, secure, and run Elasticsearch cost effectively at
scale. Rather than spending considerable time and resources on managing the
Elasticsearch clusters on its own, Pearson used the managed Amazon Elasticsearch
Service as part of its initiative to modernize its products. "
"Shot of two young women using a laptop together in a college library"
"kr_quotemark"
"As we migrate to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, we can start to focus on what\
u2019s necessary from a security perspective. We can bring in different skill sets
and focus on what\u2019s more important to the company rather than just maintaining
standard hardware or infrastructure.\u201d "
"Muthu Meyyappan"
"VP of Security Engineering and Product Security Officer, Pearson"
"Meeting the Needs of the Modern World"
"As one of the largest and oldest educational companies in the world, Pearson
operates in 70 different countries. The company provides a wide variety of
educational content and assessments and other services, which are often specialized
for different target audiences. As the company moved toward digitization in the
cloud, it began to use AWS services. At first, Pearson used Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2)\u2014a web service that provides secure, resizable compute
capacity in the cloud\u2014to power its self-managed open-source Elasticsearch. But
the company found that a self-managed approach posed several challenges. \u201cOne
of the major issues we had was with the security portion of the fine-grained access
control\u2014we weren\u2019t able to work through that,\u201d says Muthu Meyyappan,
vice president of security engineering and product security officer for Pearson. \
u201cAnother challenge was maintaining the upgrades and the usual service
management below the line, which consumed the effort of a full-time engineer to
maintain the platform.\u201d"
"In order to iron out its access control to log data and reduce the amount of time
spent on updates, Pearson turned to Amazon Elasticsearch Service. \u201cWhen we
were updating the open-source Elasticsearch, it took time to make sure we didn\
u2019t miss any data,\u201d says Meyyappan. \u201cWe were looking to have someone
else take that accountability. If there is data lost, for example, Amazon
Elasticsearch Service enables us to go back 14 days and get the index back.
Features like that encouraged us to migrate to the managed service.\u201d"
"TestWe Turns to AWS to Drive Global Expansion"
"2021"
"In 2014, colleagues Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier and Charles Zhu came across a study
that indicated 95 percent of European students owned laptops. However, educational
institutions continued to rely on paper-based exams. That\u2019s when R\u00e9gnier
and Zhu decided to launch TestWe, a platform for administering in-class and remote
computer-based assessments. \u201cStudents were using their devices for taking
notes, research, and sending emails,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cIt only made
sense for them to use their laptops to take exams as well.\u201d"
"The TestWe solution gives students the ability to take exams securely, in the
classroom or at home. Educational institutions can administer digital exams while
eliminating the possibility of students getting help from online resources or other
people since the tests are taken offline and recorded by a camera. The TestWe exam
process runs in the cloud and can be fully integrated into a school\u2019s learning
management system. Additionally, the tests can run directly on any type of student
devices."
"Today, TestWe is available in seven different languages and used in countries
throughout Western Europe as well as in North and South America. Every year, TestWe
helps teachers create millions of test questions."
"Student studies outside"
"kr_quotemark"
"Using AWS services enhances our credibility. Partners and customers know our tests
will run reliably and scale easily.\u201d"
"Cl\u00e9ment R\u00e9gnier"
"Cofounder and Chief Commercial Officer, TestWe"
"Global Expansion Requires Greater Firepower in the Cloud"
"In the early years of the company, TestWe relied on a regional cloud-platform
provider to host its applications. The company then began to expand to markets
throughout Western Europe and into Canada and South America. R\u00e9gnier and Zhu
soon realized they needed to migrate their testing applications to a provider with
global capabilities\u2014one that could deliver applications from local regional
data centers. \u201cWe wanted to ensure students, teachers, and administrators
continued to experience fast performance when interacting with the tests, no matter
where they are located,\u201d says R\u00e9gnier. \u201cAnd with a larger customer
base, we needed to make sure our cloud infrastructure could handle spikes in
activity.\u201d"
"University of Oxford Introduces a Sector-Leading Image Recognition ML Prototype to
Augment Digitization in Numismatics"
"2021"
"The University of Oxford houses 21 million objects in the collections of its
Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM)\u2014artifacts and specimens that are among the
world\u2019s most significant. One aspect of GLAM\u2019s mission is to preserve
these assets and make them accessible to the world for education and research.
However, the organization has only enough space to display about 10 percent of its
holdings at a time, and there\u2019s an enormous backlog of artifacts still waiting
to be cataloged. To tackle that obstacle, GLAM used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to
build an enhanced image recognition system that would help accelerate the process
of cataloging artifacts."
"The Gardens and Museums IT team used Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service
that provides developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and
deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. Powered by Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, the models were trained and deployed at low cost to
automatically catalog the extensive coin collection of the Ashmolean Museum\
u2014which is the United Kingdom\u2019s first public museum and the world\u2019s
first university museum. On AWS, the image recognition system identifies and
catalogs coins in a fraction of the time it would take human volunteers to complete
the same task."
"Exterior of the Ashmolean Museum."
"kr_quotemark"
"I thought this project would be complex and time consuming, but using AWS made it
easy.\u201d"
"Anjanesh Babu"
"Systems Architect and Network Manager, Gardens and Museums IT, University of
Oxford's Gardens, Libraries & Museums"
"Updating Infrastructure and Creating an ML-Based Cataloging System on AWS"
"GLAM comprises four museums\u2014the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, the
Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the
History of Science Museum\u2014as well as the Bodleian Libraries and the Oxford
Botanic Garden & Harcourt Arboretum. In 2019, GLAM saw 900,000 visitors to its
digital collections. Its 21 million objects include live specimens and plants,
historical artifacts, and even images of objects that were damaged, lost, or
returned to collectors. \u201cFor many years, the museums were not overly active at
investing in and managing the information technology infrastructure that underpins
all our digital services,\u201d says Anjanesh Babu, systems architect and network
manager at Gardens and Museums IT. \u201cAfter years of underinvestment in outdated
infrastructure, the University of Oxford brought together a strategic focus on
digital transformation through the GLAM Digital program.\u201d As part of this
program, the Digital Estate Improvement project was the foundational part to
deliver root and branch improvements to the infrastructure to make it fit to meet
the digital aspirations laid out in the objectives. In 2017, the project uploaded
60 TB of digital records to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object
storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability,
security, and performance."
"UFE Mongolia Goes Online in 10 Days with AWS"
"2020"