Case Study | DevOps Automation for Learning Application | Learning Upgrade

Executive Summary

Learning Upgrade is used in schools around the world to help students with their own path to learning success. Their program offers over 1,020 lessons and 22 courses that work with students of all ages and abilities. The Learning Upgrade LMS platform enables teachers to track student progress in real-time.

Stratus10 assisted Learning Upgrade in implementing a highly available, fault-tolerant, and secure infrastructure and CI/CD release pipeline to meet their current and future demands of their growing client base.
 

About Learning Upgrade

Learning Upgrade empowers education providers around the globe to rapidly upskill their learners in English ESL, math, test prep, and job skills via an engaging mobile solution. It gives each student their own path to learning successoffering 1,000+ lessons for students of all ages and abilities. 

The Learning Upgrade Learning Management System (LMS) enables teachers to track student progress in real-time, whether monitoring individual student growth, class participation, or multiple accounts as an admin. 

Website: https://web.learningupgrade.com
 

Customer Challenges

Learning Upgrade was facing scaling challenges with the initial infrastructure that was hosting their learning platform due to increased demand from COVID-19. Learning Upgrade's client base was growing and they needed to be ready for the projected growth. Scalability, security, and resiliency were of top priority for the company in order to protect existing and new clients and to provide them with a highly available, secure, and high-performing application to reverse the learning loss created by COVID-19.

Learning Upgrade recognized that not addressing scalability could lead to loss of existing customers and not being able to retain new clients.
 

Why AWS

AWS provided Learning Upgrade with a wealth of options to modernize their infrastructure in the future and meet the scaling and security needs of their solution. In addition, the pay-as-you-go pricing model provided a cost-effective option to host their applications.

By leveraging native AWS services such as CloudFormation, Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), Auto Scaling Groups, Load Balancers, AWS VPC, Systems Manager, AWS CloudFront, AWS CodePipeline, AWS Secrets Manager and Amazon RDS, Learning Upgrade is able to deliver solutions that are optimized for the cloud.
 

Why Stratus10

Stratus10 was the perfect fit to deliver the solution for Learning Upgrade. Our expertise across AWS’ suite of services ensured that Learning Upgrade’s solution was delivered using the best combination of tools available and best practices. Stratus10’s experience in delivering highly available, fault-tolerant, and secure solutions across the AWS ecosystem resulted in a smooth delivery of the solution that met all of the customers scaling, cost, and performance targets.
 

The Solution

Stratus10 assisted Learning Upgrade by designing and building a secure and reliable solution on AWS for their .NET application. The solution was designed and built using AWS's Well-Architected best practices. It included a three-tier network infrastructure across multiple availability zones, load balancers, a highly-available database configuration using RDS for SQL Server, and auto-scaling groups in order to achieve high availability and scalability.

Various features of AWS Systems Manager were implemented to manage resource inventory, manage OS patching, automate various updates, and allow users to connect to instances via a secure shell.  

The solution was built using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) automation which allows Learning Upgrade to maintain and manage their infrastructure using best practices. 

In addition, a Security Framework was implemented by using Security Groups, SSL certificates, and AWS best practices for authentication and authorization including Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies and roles. 

The resulting solution allowed Learning Upgrade to host their application in a highly scalable, secure, and reliable manner in order to support the growth of their user base. 

A custom, cutting-edge, CI/CD Pipeline was built using AWS services such as AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeCommit, and AWS CodeBuild, which allows Learning Upgrade to confidently deliver new functionality multiple times a day as opposed to once a month.
 

Results and Benefits

Learning Upgrade’s solution built around AWS Cloudformation Templates has significantly reduced the time it takes to stand up and update infrastructure for their different environments (Development, Staging, and Production).  The consistency delivered through the infrastructure as code approach has also greatly simplified the administration of each of their environments: development, stage, and production.

By taking advantage of Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD in the Learning Upgrade solution, Stratus10 has helped them optimize the cost of running their different environments and simplified the release management of the Learning Upgrade solution.
The amalgamation of AWS with Learning Management Systems has ushered in a new era of e-learning. From educational institutions to global corporations, the success stories of AWS integration with LMS platforms speak volumes about its impact. The advantages of cost-effectiveness, scalability, security, and flexibility make AWS an invaluable tool for the future of education and training. Embrace the power of AWS, and unlock a world of possibilities for your learning journey