Why RedBus Uses AWS?
RedBus is an Indian online bus ticketing platform providing ticket booking facility through its website, iOS and Android mobile apps. Headquartered in Bengaluru, India, it connects bus travellers with a network of over 2500 bus operators, across India, countries in South East Asia and Latin America. The company also offers software, on a Software as a Service (SaaS) basis, which gives bus operators the option of handling their own ticketing and managing their own inventories. To date, the company says they have sold over 30 million bus tickets and has more than 1750 bus operators using the software to manage their operations.
Challenges Faced by the RedBus:-
The company previously ran its operations from a traditional data center by purchasing and renting its systems and infrastructure. In addition to the expense, several logistical problems evolved from this arrangement. The biggest problem was that the infrastructure could not effectively handle processing fluctuations, which had a negative impact on productivity. Additionally, the procurement of servers or upgrading the server configuration was an extremely time-consuming endeavor.
RedBus receives complaints from customers mainly regarding Refunds, Cancellations, Operator queries etc… The process of classifying these emails and redirecting them to the respective customer service agents/queue becomes a humongous task. This also increases during peak days (especially holidays and weekends).
RedBus also has one more challenge that the marketplace model of RedBus necessitates a smart way to present customer reviews where the user generated content is showcased in terms of reviews, ratings and comments in a simpler and convenient way in terms of tags and categories. Additionally, this has to be done at a large scale.
Over time, redBus realized that a better solution was imperative — a solution that offered scalability to handle the company’s processing fluctuations. redBus looked to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for a solution.
Why RedBus go for the Amazon Web Services?
After testing the AWS solution on a small application for several months, the travel agency determined that it was very workable and convenient. Although redBus was quite enthusiastic about the on-demand instances and variety of instance types, several other features cemented the company’s decision to migrate completely to AWS. These features included the ability to easily manage access to servers through security groups, the easy-to-use, self-service management console, the concept of Elastic IPs, and superior support.
As the redbus ran its operations from a traditional data center by purchasing and renting its systems and infrastructure to solve this challenge redbus shifted to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud( Amazon ec2) and by shifting to this feature of the AWS redbus has an overall cost benefit of about 30–40%.
Also to solve the challenge of managing so much reviews and queries coming from the user specially during the peak time redbus is finding difficult to arrange the reviews and to solve the queries of the user so they decide to use the Machine learning concepts to give proper tags to the queries and the reviews. But for using the machine learning concepts they have to invest for the ml professionals instead they go for the Amazon Sagemaker service on which they use the BYOM (Bring your own Model) feature to host their custom models as well.
The company has incorporated many of the AWS products into its solution, including:-
Elastic Load Balancing for balancing the traffic coming on the redbus site as well as to deploy the site. Also use the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to store the data of the user like profile , travel history ,etc by doing so they are saving the money by not investing to the physical storage devices instead use the aws services.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) uses this storage service so that they can retrive the data used in the app or website fastly. As Amazon CloudWatch is a by which redbus uses the aws network and thus decreases the latency to the user. Charan Padmaraju, Chief Technology Officer believes that “with features like Elastic Load Balancing and multiple availability zones, AWS provides the required infrastructure to build for redundancy and auto-failover. When you incorporate these in your system/application design, you can achieve high reliability and scale.”
Benefits RedBus get on using AWS:-
<>They use Amazon SageMaker for tagging all of the ratings. They categorize six million reviews into five tags. The customer can go to each tag and read the specific reviews and comments.SageMaker has been revolutionary in saving development time
<> They use Amazon Athena to run queries against the raw data that are identified as frauds. They have built out a run-time graph generation and evaluation engine to recognize frauds and block the same. They are currently evaluating SageMaker’s unsupervised learning/training for anomaly detection across our various verticals.
<>Of the many excellent characteristics of AWS, perhaps the most significant to redBus is the ability to “instantly replicate the whole setup on demand for testing by creating and destroying instances on demand for experimentation, thereby reducing the time to market.”
<>AWS solution to include Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) for monitoring, alerts, and intercommunication.
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