Edurio Transforms EdTech Platform with AWS Cloud-Native Architecture and DevOps

Intro

Edurio is a leading education technology company that provides a comprehensive stakeholder feedback platform for schools and trusts across the UK. Serving over 150 trusts and 2,000 schools, their survey and analytics tools empower education leaders to gather insights from pupils, parents and staff enabling data-driven decisions that drive school improvement. With England's largest educational benchmarking datasets Edurio processes hundreds of thousands of survey responses annually. As a rapidly growing platform in the competitive EdTech sector Edurio needed to ensure its infrastructure could scale to meet increasing demand while empowering its development team to innovate quickly and efficiently.

The Challenge

Scalability Limitations: The platform needed to handle exponentially growing volumes of survey data and concurrent users during peak periods, particularly at the start of academic terms when thousands of schools launch surveys simultaneously, without compromising performance or user experience.

Manual Deployment Bottlenecks: Manual deployment and infrastructure management processes were becoming a significant bottleneck, slowing down the development lifecycle and preventing the team from responding quickly to customer needs and market opportunities.

Lack of Developer Autonomy: The development team lacked the autonomy to provision and manage resources independently, creating dependencies on operations staff and hindering their ability to experiment, innovate and take ownership of their services.

Data Analytics at Scale: Processing and analyzing large datasets from surveys across thousands of schools required a more robust, scalable and cost-effective data architecture that could support complex analytical queries and reporting requirements.

Operational Inefficiency: The team was spending excessive time on infrastructure management, server maintenance and manual processes, diverting focus from core product development and feature innovation that would benefit their customers.

Cost Optimization: Without proper cloud financial management practices, infrastructure costs were not optimized and the team lacked visibility into spending patterns and opportunities for cost reduction.

Our Solution

GOStack partnered with Edurio to design and implement a modern, cloud-native architecture on AWS and instill a culture of DevOps excellence:

Cloud-Native Application Platform: We built a scalable and resilient application platform using Amazon EKS for container orchestration, allowing for automated scaling and management of microservices. This Kubernetes-based infrastructure enables Edurio to deploy, manage and scale containerized applications with ease. The data layer utilizes Amazon Aurora MySQL for relational data requiring ACID compliance and Amazon DynamoDB for high-performance, scalable NoSQL data storage, providing a flexible and robust multi-database architecture optimized for different workload patterns.

Serverless Data Processing Pipeline: We leveraged a suite of AWS serverless technologies to build a powerful and cost-effective data processing pipeline. AWS Lambda functions handle event-driven data processing, triggered automatically by events from survey submissions and data updates. AWS Glue performs ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) jobs, preparing and transforming raw survey data for analysis. The processed data is stored in Amazon Redshift, a fully managed data warehouse optimised for complex analytical queries and queried using Amazon Athena, an interactive query service that enables analysis of data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL without infrastructure management.

GitOps and CI/CD Automation: We introduced a comprehensive GitOps workflow using ArgoCD to automate the deployment process, enabling the development team to manage infrastructure and applications declaratively through Git repositories. This approach provides a single source of truth for the desired state of the entire system, enables version control for infrastructure changes and facilitates a fully automated, self-service model for the team. We implemented automated preview environments that spin up dynamically for each pull request, allowing developers to test changes in isolated, production-like environments before merging to production, significantly improving code quality, reducing deployment risks and accelerating the feedback loop.

Infrastructure as Code: We implemented true infrastructure as code practices, treating infrastructure configuration with the same mindset as application code. All infrastructure components are defined, versioned and managed through code, enabling reproducibility, consistency across environments and the ability to quickly provision or tear down entire environments. This approach eliminates configuration drift and ensures that infrastructure changes go through the same review and approval processes as application code.

FinOps and Cost Optimization: We established cloud financial management practices, implementing cost monitoring, allocation and optimization strategies. By rightsizing resources, leveraging reserved instances and savings plans where appropriate, optimizing data storage tiers and implementing automated scaling policies, we achieved significant cost reductions while maintaining performance. The team now has full visibility into cloud spending and can make informed decisions about resource allocation.

DevOps Transformation: Established modern CI/CD pipelines with automated testing and deployment processes, significantly improving development velocity and code quality.

Self-Service Developer Empowerment: The new architecture and DevOps practices empowered Edurio's development team with comprehensive self-service capabilities. Developers can now provision infrastructure, deploy applications, manage their services, access logs and metrics and troubleshoot issues with minimal operational overhead, fostering a culture of ownership, accountability and innovation. This autonomy has dramatically improved developer satisfaction and productivity.

Monitoring & Observability: Set up comprehensive monitoring and logging solutions to provide visibility into application performance and system health.

Results and Benefits

• Time-to-Market Acceleration: 40% reduction in time-to-market for new features through automated GitOps workflows and preview environments

• Cost Optimization: 35% cost savings achieved through FinOps practices, rightsizing and serverless architecture

• Developer Autonomy: 60% improvement in developer autonomy and productivity through self-service capabilities

• Enhanced Scalability: The platform seamlessly handles increased user loads and data volumes, with automatic scaling during peak survey periods

• Preview Environments: Automated preview environments for every pull request enable developers to test and validate changes in isolation, reducing bugs and deployment risks

• Infrastructure as Code: True infrastructure as code implementation ensures consistency, reproducibility and version control for all infrastructure changes

• Scalable Data Analytics: The new serverless data architecture enables Edurio to perform complex data analysis at scale, processing millions of survey responses efficiently and cost-effectively

• Operational Efficiency: Significant reduction in operational burden, allowing the team to focus on product innovation and customer value

• Deployment Frequency: Increased deployment frequency from weekly to multiple times per day with zero-downtime deployments

• System Reliability: Improved platform reliability and uptime through automated monitoring, alerting and self-healing capabilities