Partner Success with AWS / Education / Canada

January 2025
eSafetyFirst
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eSafetyFirst Speeds Code Deployment by 4x and Cuts Management Time 30% with safeINIT on AWS

Learn how eSafetyFirst boosted stability, quadrupled deployment speed, and cut infrastructure management time by 30% on AWS.

50%

improvement in infrastructure stability

30%

reduction in infrastructure management time

4x

faster code deployment

Overview

eSafetyFirst is a Romanian company that works exclusively serving Canadian businesses and job seekers. It provides online occupational health and safety training and certification in French and English hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Canada. The company wanted to ensure that it maintained excellent service as its business grew so it sought a local partner to work with. eSafetyFirst chose AWS Partner safeINIT to work on a transformation project for its training platform. But when initial plans to move core compute services to containers proved problematic, safeINIT quickly pivoted and built a new solution in response to changing needs.

eSafetyFirst

Opportunity | A Complex Website that Needed Optimizing and Securing

eSafetyFirst helps Canadian companies deliver the right safety training to their staff to keep them out of danger and compliant with changing regulations. The platform helps human resources managers more easily keep track of certification and renewal dates for hundreds of employees, choose from more than 36 courses, and automatically inform staff about the training that they need to stay compliant. The system is also used by job candidates who want to update their qualifications to make themselves more attractive to prospective employers. Training is delivered exclusively online through a variety of interactive presentations, quizzes, and other rich media content. Courses cover every industry and topic, from Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System training to Transportation of Dangerous Goods certifications.

Although it does accept payments, the website is more than just an ecommerce platform. Typical dwell times are much longer than on a retail site and user journeys are less predictable. This brings challenges of agility and scalability—demand is unpredictable and varies greatly during normal working hours and decreases significantly in the early evening. Users can dip in and out of training sessions during the day and require minimal latency so that they can complete courses as quickly as possible. eSafetyFirst knew that it could provide a better and faster experience for its users by improving caching, but it also had concerns around security after targeted denial of service (DoS) attacks.

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We trusted safeINIT to improve our performance and our security and that’s what they did.”

Cosmin Rebegila
Founder and Chief Executive Officer, eSafetyFirst

Solution | An Agile Solution Changed in Response to Business Needs

eSafetyFirst had tried several ways to get more from its AWS investment. “We’d worked with a variety of freelancers to improve our AWS performance before finding the AWS Partner Network and just searching for someone local with the right expertise—that’s how I found safeINIT,” says Cosmin Rebegila, founder and chief executive officer at eSafetyFirst. “We just clicked with them. They treat us fairly, they’re available when we need them, and they really listened to us and our developers.” This relationship saw the project proceed without set key performance indicators or targets. “We didn’t say ‘we want 25 percent better speed’, or this or that,” says Rebegila. “We trusted them to improve our performance and our security and that’s what they did. If I go to the doctor and he tells me to take a pill—I take the pill, I trust his expertise.”

But Rebegila also appreciated safeINIT’s attention to developer concerns and its ability to be agile and pivot when required. The original plan was to migrate and re-engineer workloads into containers but after feedback from developers, this was changed to using an optimized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) setup. “Developers always hate change but safeINIT did listen to the guys using the tools and adjusted the plan,” says Rebegila. The team used Amazon CloudFront to automate scaling and serve content with low latency. The setup was simple, because much of eSafetyFirst’s content is static, enabling it to be cached to improve site performance. New code releases now happen automatically with no manual interventions using AWS CodePipeLine. The team used Amazon CloudWatch to monitor resources and applications and help to strengthen the site against DoS attacks. safeINIT also recommended using Amazon Aurora to simplify infrastructure administration.

Outcome | 50% Better Stability, 4x Faster Deployment, 30% Less Time Managing Infrastructure

The project brought a 50 percent improvement in infrastructure stability and has reduced time spent on managing resources by 30 percent. Using AWS CodePipeLine, new code can be deployed 4 times faster compared with previous manual deployments. With better auditing and version control, the site is more reliable and can be easily rolled back if necessary. eSafetyFirst appreciates the set-and-forget nature of Amazon Aurora. “I want to set up a server and just pay the bill,” says Rebegila. “I don’t want to have to keep tweaking it, Aurora does all the scaling automatically.”

The project has improved site security and provided a templated solution that could be easily replicated into other countries to support international expansion. eSafetyFirst and safeINIT continue to work together and are looking at rebuilding the front end of the website to clean up old code, reduce reliance on third-party plugins, and simplify how pages are served and rendered. This should both improve performance for users and make the site perform better on search engine rankings.

About eSafetyFirst

eSafetyFirst is based in Romania and works with companies and clients in Canada. It has successfully trained over 200,000 people using more than 36 courses and certifications. As well as helping individuals, it provides a platform for human resources managers to keep track of staff certifications and automates training schedules to keep staff safe and help companies stay compliant with relevant regulations.

About AWS Partner safeINIT

Based in Bucharest, Romania, safeINIT helps businesses reap the benefits of cloud technology. It enhances existing cloud infrastructure and experiments with the latest developments to deliver modern solutions to clients. safeINIT enables startups and enterprises to use cloud capabilities—supported by DevOps, automation, and security—for rapid growth with agile scalability, enhanced mobility, increased collaboration, and reduced costs.

AWS Services Used

Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) offers the broadest and deepest compute platform, with over 750 instances and choice of the latest processor, storage, networking, operating system, and purchase model to help you best match the needs of your workload.

Learn more »

Amazon CloudFront

Securely deliver content with low latency and high transfer speeds with Amazon CloudFront.
Learn more »

Amazon CodePipeline

Automate continuous delivery pipelines for fast and reliable updates with AWS CloudFront.

Learn more »

Amazon Aurora

Amazon Aurora provides unparalleled high-performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility, at 1/10th the cost of commercial databases.

Learn more »

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