Edunation scales up to 32 times activity by boosting infrastructure with AWS

Using Amazon Web Services (AWS), Edunation seamlessly responded to increasing demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. The cloud allowed the education technology (EdTech) company to scale its platform to handle up to 32 times activity and implement new technology quickly. Edunation collaborates with top educational institutions across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and provides all-in-one learning and school management solutions.

Today, the EdTech is on a mission to push learning management systems (LMS) beyond virtual classrooms. Their platform provides a customizable set of modules with features that help schools manage everything from curriculums and assessments to administration and finance. This comprehensive solution comes with an established customer support and training system.

A system schools can count on

An interruption-free experience is essential to supporting productivity, interaction, and knowledge retention. When schools began to move to virtual, Edunation became the virtual campus, stepping in for the classrooms, the staff rooms, and even the hallways. This experience, its reliability, and consistency became more important than ever before. Scaling on demand with AWS allowed the platform to run smoothly with 99.9 percent uptime for students to connect with their teachers, for staff to resume school administration, and for parents to keep up with their children’s progress.

The onset of the pandemic in early 2020 was a turning point for the company. Edunation found itself in a position to alleviate many of the unforeseen challenges that schools were suddenly facing. Rapidly, Edunation’s platform saw 1,200 percent growth in users. The growth is attributed to existing clients, from K12 schools to universities across MENA, expanding their suite of modules, in addition to new academic institutions making the digital switch within as little as 24 hours.

To accommodate new users and achieve the performance needed, the Edunation team relied on AWS to effectively boost Edunation’s performance and help scale the platform by up to 32 times usage. Some of the products used include: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for application hosting; Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL for main database hosting; Amazon ElastiCache for enhancing performance; and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon CloudFront for storing, securing, and delivering static content at scale.

Focus on what truly matters

With AWS, Edunation achieved its reliability and availability goals so that it can continue to deliver for students and educators. AWS now handles the hosting environment, enabling the Edunation’s team of developers to do more with their time and effort. Now, they can focus on EdTech research and development, rather than dealing with IT issues and overloaded servers.

“Developing innovative educational technology is what we do best,” says Mahmud Gabareen, chief technology officer of Edunation. “We can allocate more time doing that by relying on AWS to take care of the hosting environment and utilizing their broad set of infrastructure services,” Gabareen says. Firas Jabbour, chief executive officer of Edunation adds, “AWS also provided continuous advice and assistance from its experts, which helped us focus on business growth, customer success, and developing new tools.”

With more time dedicated to developing new tools, the Edunation team is exploring the use of Amazon Athena for data analytics and Amazon SageMaker for machine learning (ML) solutions. With detailed insights and reports, schools can access untapped pools of information, enabling more data-driven decision making.

Jabbour said, “With AWS, there are endless possibilities and a potential impact on revolutionizing the academic experience. Using Athena, we can analyze data to keep up with trends and inform actions, from sending announcements at the right time to making critical decisions like assigning support teachers for struggling students.”

With AWS, Edunation’s team can spend more time on research and development of new features and tools to improve the student and educator experience. With 99.99 percent uptime and the ability to scale on demand, Edunation can deliver learning experiences to students virtually anywhere, anytime, and on any device, and serves more than half a billion page views per month.

Read more education stories including Pearson, the University of Keele, and Chesterfield County Public Schools.

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