AWS Case Study: Yanadoo

Yanadoo is an edu-tech company acquired by Kakao Kids under Kakao Corp in 2020. Since then, it has released a series of new education platforms such as Yanadoo Youcandoo and Yanadoo Class, growing into a leading education company that provides services for all demographics from kids to adults. Yanadoo is rapidly expanding into new business areas by adding new services — Yanadoo Youcandoo, a motivational platform, and Yanadoo Fitness, a home fitness training service — on top of its original English teaching business, bringing a new paradigm in the online education service market.     

Yanadoo saw a remarkable growth in a short period of time based on its English teaching content specifically designed for online classes. It ranked no.1 in the Customer Satisfaction Index and Brand Awards Competition in South Korea in 2017 and became one of the biggest players in online English tutoring service market in Korea with the membership of more than 1 million. But it was using a single server in an on-premises environment and was having a hard time expanding the business due to large initial implementation costs, operational and maintenance issues of the existing environment, and most of all, unpredictable traffic patterns. Daeyoon Han, Youcandoo Development Team Manager said, “The one server we had in our on-premises environment went down frequently, and we had to manually restart it every time it was down. We also had to go where it was whenever there were hardware issues. With cloud computing, we have a reliable and flexible environment. Most importantly, it provides high availability at the same cost. That is why we landed on cloud computing.”

Yanadoo’s main criteria for ideal cloud solutions was that it must be reliable, secure, scalable enough to support the company’s global expansion initiative. It looked at other domestic and global cloud service providers, but chose AWS because of its broadest set of services. Han says, ”We can operate and manage our services flexibly conveniently on AWS because it provides various managed services. This means that we can develop our services with the minimum number of developers. When we looked for cloud solution providers, we particularly wanted the ones that had manuals or references we could refer to as our developers had no experience building services on the cloud. AWS had the widest range of documents and references. For us, it was an obvious choice.”

The Youcandoo platform is built upon a variety of AWS services, but each service uses different AWS accounts to minimize disruption on the infrastructure and establish visibility on the costs. Each service also has its own Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). This independent architecture allows more flexibility in terms of service operation. The VPCs are connected via VPC peering, so they are very secure too. The platform is serviced online, so it uses AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) to detect and block abnormal traffic request patterns. Also, the company uses Elastic Load Balancing to distribute traffic and Auto Scaling to scale flexibly. Increased traffic means more management work. With RDS Aurora and Amazon ElastiCache, database management becomes easier than ever. The company also implemented Amazon RDS Proxy service recently to manage connections to relational databases more effectively as web applications with auto scaling request more connections than they use.

With the increasing AWS usage, Yanadoo wanted to optimize costs and performance. It tested AWS Graviton2 — a custom-built processor released by AWS recently — and found that adopting the processor did not require many changes to its existing architecture. It conducted and completed a few more tests and is now moving to AWS Graviton 2 in a gradual manner. It expects that this new processer will improve performance while optimizing costs.

Han says, “We use several AWS services, and the most satisfying and useful ones have been AWS RDS Proxy and AWS Graviton2. You can build similar functions on premises without using them, but you will end up wasting a lot of time identifying issues if anything happens. With AWS managed services, you don’t have to hire more developers to manage services. It is also very cost competitive. So Graviton 2 has been very useful for us.”

AWS cloud technologies enables Yanadoo improve security, develop applications faster and develop services with high reliability. It uses Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) and Amazon SageMaker to develop services that can meet continually changing needs of customers. It plans to gradually incrase the use of AWS services to support its ambition for global expansion.

Learn more about AWS Graviton2.