Transforming Education on AWS: Improving Scalability & Innovation on the Cloud

As EdTech companies strive to meet the growing demand for online learning, optimizing cloud resources becomes essential for delivering reliable and high-performance educational solutions.

In this blog, we’ll explore why one of our EdTech customers was looking to modernize their cloud infrastructure. By optimizing AWS Lambda functions, refining RDS MySQL Aurora clusters, and transitioning EKS pods to ECS Fargate-based tasks, they not only achieved significant cost savings but also enhanced the scalability and efficiency of their platform. These tailored cloud solutions empower educational institutions to better serve students and educators, ensuring that their technology can adapt and grow with the needs of the modern classroom.

Enabling Greater Scalability and Innovation on the AWS Cloud

The customer is an education-focused technology company that delivers solutions to protect children. Their platform creates safer online experiences, preventing cyberbullying, school violence, and more.   

Prior to engaging with Caylent, the customer utilized a hybrid cloud setup, due to a series of acquisitions and historical decisions. While most of their platform and applications were built on AWS, several legacy workloads ran in capacity-constrained data centers. As education shifted online during the COVID-19 Pandemic, usage of customer solutions by school systems and districts around the world grew exponentially. Workloads built on AWS could take advantage of automation, elastic scalability, and various fully managed cloud-native services. The workloads in their data centers experienced significant scalability limitations, leading the customer team to engage with Caylent and plan an all-in on AWS migration to provide both short-term and long-term benefits to the company and customers. The customer did not simply want to re-create their data center workloads in AWS but wanted to seize this opportunity to modernize their cloud infrastructure and data processes. 

The Solution  

Caylent worked alongside the customer technology teams to migrate, modernize, and uplift workloads, rearchitecting or replatforming legacy applications along the way. After establishing a firm AWS Control Tower based multi-account foundation, establishing devops best practices, and migrating initial workloads, Caylent teams began the process of leveraging best-in-class AWS cloud native offerings. By separating workloads into different accounts, the customer can implement stricter security controls and compliance measures tailored to each account's specific needs. This ensures sensitive data, such as student information, is securely isolated and meets regulatory requirements. Also, different teams or departments within an EdTech company can manage their resources independently, reducing the risk of resource conflicts and making it easier to track usage and costs.

To improve the customer’s price/performance in their serverless infrastructure Caylent teams migrated 300+ AWS Lambda Functions, written in Python, Go, and Javscript, over to Graviton. Caylent teams performed extensive power tuning and performance testing across these functions to maximize price/performance. This resulted in significant cost savings for the customer. Caylent also migrated RDS MySQL Aurora clusters from x86 based db.m5.16xlarge to Graviton powered db.m6g.8xlarge resulting in significant performance and cost improvements. At this point the customer decided to standardize on Graviton for most workloads. Additionally, Caylent supported re-working their existing data process to leverage OpenSearch and other AWS native tooling to improve real time observability, analysis, and security. 

Leveraging tooling like OpenSearch enhances real-time observability and analysis, which is crucial for monitoring student progress and engagement. Enhanced security measures protect sensitive educational data from breaches, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations

Caylent migrated EKS pods into ECS Fargate Graviton based tasks, resulting in additional performance and cost savings. All EC2 powered GitHub Actions CI/CD runners were moved to Graviton.

For each of these changes Caylent educated the customer on the how and why of each architectural decision. This is one of Caylent’s core values: educate the customer.

Results

This close partnership between our teams has allowed the customer to leverage best practices and remediate known gaps in the environment while allowing the organization to continue working at the velocity needed to support their growth. By working with Caylent to grow their AWS footprint, as well as offloading core DevOps work, the customer's infrastructure is in a great position to scale effectively.

With a modernized, cloud-native infrastructure, the customer can more easily integrate new technologies and innovate. This flexibility allows them to stay competitive by quickly adapting to new educational trends and technological advancements.

Caylent’s push towards Graviton and the realized price/performance gains lead to customer standardizing on ARM and Graviton for all net-new applications. To support this Caylent teams created a Graviton Handbook to help customer teams migrate, build, and deploy ARM based workloads.

Overall, such improvements enable EdTech companies to deliver more effective, reliable, and innovative educational solutions, ultimately enhancing the learning experience for students and educators alike.