Preply Becomes a Global Provider of Online Courses with AWS

Preply grows from a startup servicing eastern European countries to a global online business with AWS. The company helps students find online tutors in multiple subjects and 50 languages. Preply uses a wide range of AWS services including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service to automate development pipelines and Amazon ElastiCache to improve website speed.

Preply is an educational technology company that provides online access to more than 25,000 tutors, offering classes on multiple subjects in 50 languages. Since the Ukraine-based startup launched in 2012, students have signed up to more than five million lessons.

At first, Preply served countries only in eastern Europe and used services from multiple cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS). “We saw that the tooling and services that we needed were available in AWS,” says Dmytro Voloshyn, cofounder at Preply, “so we migrated our entire infrastructure.”

“Keeping costs under control is crucial for a startup,” says Voloshyn. “We did this by joining AWS Activate, which gave us access to credits and technical support to fine tune our AWS infrastructure.” Preply subsequently looked for a way to automate software delivery and cut management time. Following guidance from AWS, it adopted Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a fully managed Kubernetes service.

Says Voloshyn, “Automation helped us reduce the delivery time for new software from 100 hours to 30 minutes, enabling greater speed of innovation.”

Besides innovation, Preply wanted to drive growth through better website performance. Using Amazon ElastiCache, a fully managed in-memory data store, and Amazon CloudFront, a fast content delivery network, Preply reduced website latency from 1.5 seconds to 500 milliseconds. “By applying AWS services, we increased customer conversion rates on the website by 5 percent,” says Voloshyn.

Using AWS, Preply continues to improve student experiences. The quality of video calls was a concern and classes were sometimes interrupted by lagging. With the Amazon Chime communication service, however, video call quality immediately improved 20 percent on Preply’s scorecard, and continues to get better. “Customer satisfaction is constantly going up,” says Voloshyn. “With AWS, we’ve grown to become a global business—just 5 percent of our revenue now comes from eastern Europe.”