Renaissance Learning improves operations and scalability by migrating to AWS

Renaissance Learning is a global leader in the pre-K–12 education technology (EdTech) space. Renaissance delivers its products to 16 million students across the world, and its digital solutions are used in more than one-third of US schools and 100-plus countries. As part of its cloud consolidation strategy, Renaissance decided to migrate DnA, its standards-based assessment creation and administration solution, from Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to Amazon Web Services (AWS). After migration, Renaissance realized performance, scalability, and security improvements, all while reducing cloud spend by 30 percent. The consolidation also improved staff productivity by reducing the cognitive load to manage multiple clouds. This post describes the Renaissance migration journey from March to October 2023.

DnA’s engineering team, led by director of engineering Sebastian Gunn-Hamner, is located in the US and India and is responsible for both the development and operation of the application, which supports 1,000-plus customers. Prior to migration, the team was relatively new to AWS. Most of their experience was in GCP, Kubernetes, and a third-party monitoring solution. The team members learned AWS through various online courses and AWS Immersion Days.

Migration and modernization

The DnA and AWS teams worked together through a series of sessions to deep dive into the existing DnA architecture and create a reference architecture for AWS. The AWS team provided demonstrations of the AWS managed services such as AWS DataSync, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), AWS Transfer Family, and AWS continuous integration and development (CI/CD) services to explore possible solutions for DnA.

As an example, DataSync, a fully managed data movement solution, was used to migrate 12 terabytes (TB) of 42 million-plus files and objects from GCP to AWS. During these sessions, the team also identified several modernization opportunities, and the DnA team sized the level of effort required to implement them. Some modernization items were simple, such as using Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) to consolidate configuration files or automate provisioning using Terraform. Other modernization required upgrading the application’s framework and refactoring the code.

In each case, the benefit and effort to modernize were weighed against the goal to complete the migration on time. Based on these decisions, the team created a migration plan that would be the least disruptive to the school districts and gain the optimal modernization benefits. The out-of-scope modernization items were captured on the backload for future phases.

Learn by doing

AWS recommended an Experience-Based Acceleration (EBA) focused on migrations in June 2023. An EBA is a transformation methodology using hands-on, immersive interaction to accelerate an organization’s cloud adoption. The DnA team agreed to a three-day migration EBA to be held at an AWS facility in mid-July. The goal was to migrate a nonproduction DnA application into an AWS environment.

The teams broke down the goal into several workstreams, then completed the prerequisites and removed blockers leading up to the EBA. AWS provided technical and planning support leading up to and during the event. At the event, DnA team members participated both in person and remotely in India, providing an opportunity for several DnA team members to meet and adding to a healthy team equation. By the end of the third day, the DnA team had migrated the main application, along with 30 databases, from GCP to AWS.

“It’s been an amazing experience for the whole team, especially meeting in person since the team works remotely. We probably knocked out about two-to-three weeks’ worth of work over the three days. It has drastically improved and accelerated our ability to make quick decisions,” said Gunn-Hamner. “Our team is able to make ad-hoc decisions and unblock each other, which is incredibly helpful. We’re excited about sharing this AWS experience with our Renaissance colleagues.”

Completion and impact

Leading up to the migration, the team created a detailed runbook and executed the preparation tasks. On cutover weekend, the team successfully migrated the DnA workload with business as usual on the following Monday. The team recognized that having a documentation for the cutover with assignees, steps, time estimation, and dependencies helped anticipate and better prepare to tackle any deviations or issues.

Post migration, the team achieved approximately 30 percent cloud savings for migrated resources and eliminated the cognitive load on engineers having to be experts on multiple clouds. An unexpected benefit was cleaning up components that were no longer needed. Operationally, one major improvement was simplifying the deployment process for the product’s main system. This is the first of many steps as the team moves towards full automation made possible by the migration. Architecturally, the team updated resources to current, supported versions, including operating systems and database versions. The team transitioned from Kubernetes to Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) with AWS Fargate and plans to update the runtime environment of one of the most heavily used systems from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to this architecture. Other initiatives include implementing event bus and decomposition of the monolith.

The work by the team resulted in a substantial performance improvement to the online testing application by leveraging resources in AWS to expedite the processing of scores in DnA. The team saw a significant increase in online assessments during the peak testing season while average wait times were reduced to seconds.

Conclusion

Renaissance Learning’s DnA engineering team successfully migrated to AWS and as a result, increased operational efficiency while reducing cloud spend. For the pre-K-12 customers who use DnA, this effort resulted in faster processing of scores and reduced wait times for online assessments. The DnA team is now leveraging AWS for further innovation and modernization initiatives.

Learn how to migrate and modernize with AWS and how to leverage EBA to make your migration journey more successful.

Visit the AWS Cloud for EdTech homepage to learn how AWS is empowering EdTech innovation to improve learning outcomes and secure student data.