PUBLIC UNIVERSITY

BUSINESS PROBLEM
This public university is a prestigious university with a diverse student population and a strong commitment to providing excellent student services. They created an internal chatbot tool to support preservice teachers (students pursuing their teaching certification) by providing them an environment to practice their teaching skills. The team that built the chatbot faced challenges with migrating, scaling, and optimizing their chatbot's architecture and sought to leverage cloud technology along with Scalesology’s technical expertise to overcome these hurdles.

SCALESOLOGY IN ACTION

The first phase of this challenge was the migration of the application to a cloud environment. The locally hosted app, although fine for a few users, was not suitable to cater to the demands of a large and growing user base. Scalesology ported the locally hosted application running all the services to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure. The intent of the initial phase was to port and run the application services on a single server. This preliminary application prototype running in the cloud would then be scaled up to be run on multiple servers, with each service having its own dedicated server.

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The second phase involved scaling and optimizing this chatbot application. The app now running on the AWS cloud infrastructure had an architectural bottleneck that led to delayed responses from the chatbot. This bottleneck was created due to the in-memory database running on the same server as the one running the underlying resource-hungry large language model powering the chatbot, which led to the degraded performance. Scalesology migrated the locally running database from the EC2 instance to Amazon ElastiCache, which then exponentially improved the speed and overall performance of the chatbot system running in the cloud.

RESULT
The migration, scaling, and optimization of this internal chatbot application led to a large user base being able to access and utilize this system without any hiccups.  The chatbot's scalability ensured that it could handle a higher volume of inquiries simultaneously, reducing response time and enhancing student satisfaction. The university experienced reduced IT management and maintenance overhead, as the cloud provider handled infrastructure and security updates. By only paying for the resources used, the university achieved cost savings compared to maintaining and scaling on-premises servers.​