GoGuardian Amazon Aurora and Kinesis Case Study
https://www.corpinfo.com/cloud-servic... Advait Shinde founded GoGuardian two years ago. Their mission is to transform education by helping to manage and understand technology. Schools are investing a lot of money in changing the way they teach and adopting large technology programs. They are getting things like Chromebook which give students access to the entire internet, which can also be kind of a scary place. We know the internet has a lot of potential to help kids learn and it’s important that we make sure kids are focused on the good parts of the internet.
Another interesting thing that GoGuardian does is help teachers teach. A teacher has 30 kids and they all have their laptops open. It can get relatively out of hand really quickly, so they provide GoGuardian Teacher to help the teachers see exactly what is happening in real-time on the devices, so they are able to turn them off to perhaps give instructions or talk about a quiz or something like that, or direct them through the internet on a guided tour.
When GoGuardian was making their business technology decisions after starting the company, they looking at AWS. They got very excited about the services that Amazon was offering. If you look at businesses five years ago, they often had to make the decision to go with a physical data center or try a virtualized environment. The benefits that you receive from being in a cloud environment like AWS are not even comparable to having to make the capital investment to manage your own infrastructure yourself. You get to focus on your business and delivering value to your customers instead of focusing on your infrastructure.
GoGuardian is running on AWS at scale, across the nation. It was a challenge to architect a solution that works for millions of students and devices. GoGuardian uses a ton of technology in their stack, at least 90% of it is provided by AWS. They use Kinesis to gather data from all of their students – what they are doing on the internet and if they are on task. They also use Aurora to store that data and are able to wrap all of that data up and present it in an email to give teachers a little bit of insight into what their students are doing in the classroom.
GoGuardian reached out to CorpInfo in their infancy to help answer some questions about AWS architecture and best practices. CorpInfo sales executive Jeremy Bendat, immediately believed in Advait’s passion and the GoGuardian product. Advait remembered talking to many vendors around that time and most wanted to set up formal contracts and were so expensive. Before GoGuardian had raised their first round of venture capital funding, CorpInfo invited GoGuardian to come visit our offices. We helped the company fix some critical problems and it’s a big reason why we are still working together today.
At the surface level, GoGuardian is a software company. If you drill down to what they are all about, they are really passionate about transforming education. From the analog paper and textbook world of yesterday to the internet age, where everyone is online and learning from tools that didn’t exist five years ago. That transformation is only going to be possible if you have all of the components in place. A lot of schools just need help from a financial perspective and its awesome to be able to give back. Two years ago, GoGuardian was strapped for cash, now they are on a rocket ship of growth and it’s been amazing.
Two years ago we were all huddled around my bed watching re:Invent, which was also GoGuardian’s headquarters. The Aurora announcement happened and we celebrated non-stop. We are really excited for similar AWS announcements that are going to happen and have equal impact.