PowerSchool Unlocks the Value of the Cloud with AWS and LaunchDarkly

Committed to providing a great user experience, PowerSchool wanted to orchestrate releases of its Naviance platform and deliver frequent updates to its customers without service interruptions. After migrating Naviance to AWS, PowerSchool used LaunchDarkly to update its platform, which included both legacy and new systems, with service-driven architectures and managed services like AWS Lambda and Amazon S3. LaunchDarkly also enabled PowerSchool to incrementally migrate certain data and services to the fully managed database service, Amazon DynamoDB. Using AWS and LaunchDarkly, PowerSchool can release new features in minutes while maintaining a strong customer experience.

Serving more than 45 million students, PowerSchool is on a mission to empower the education ecosystem with unified technology that helps educators and students realize their potential. Under the PowerSchool umbrella is Naviance, a leading career and life readiness platform that serves more than 10 million students of all ages.

As PowerSchool innovated both Naviance and their larger platform, it was concerned that architectural changes would affect its ability to deliver new features while maintaining a consistent user experience. Modernizing the platform's feature flag system would enable PowerSchool to control and release features safely and on time to specific customers. This was especially important in helping schools meet their unique deadlines and requirements. The company needed a solution that could support the complex challenges that come with sensitive data migrations from old databases and a comprehensive release strategy that could be customized for the bespoke needs of each district.

Having already migrated some of its systems to Amazon Web Services (AWS), PowerSchool again turned to AWS for its focus on event-driven architectures and serverless computing frameworks. “We really like the capabilities provided by services like AWS Lambda and AWS CloudFormation, and we use Amazon DynamoDB and the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) extensively. These are incredibly strong solutions,” says Adam Hisley, principal architect at PowerSchool.

To help unlock the value of cloud-native architectures on AWS, PowerSchool selected AWS Partner LaunchDarkly for its comprehensive documentation and focus on the developer experience. Thanks to a developer-friendly user interface (UI), Hisley and his team found building event-driven architectures and deploying managed services like AWS Lambda and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to be straightforward.

For the system to remain available to its customers, LaunchDarkly helped PowerSchool migrate incrementally to service-oriented architecture and micro front ends. This approach allowed for building and testing separate UIs that are then combined to deliver a cohesive customer experience. Developers could enable feature flags, quickly respond to any issues, and ensure a strong rollout to PowerSchool customers. “This was crucial when you have specific customers that need to access particular features on certain dates,” says Hisley.

In addition, LaunchDarkly proved to be a good fit for the diverse technologies PowerSchool uses to power its software. Hisley reported how his team integrated LaunchDarkly in days with typescript and PHP code bases using LaunchDarkly’s comprehensive approach to integration, including helpful solutions like its Relay Proxy and SDKs.

Moving to this new architecture with support from LaunchDarkly and AWS has allowed PowerSchool to safely and easily rewrite its software. This resulted in a reduction of over 100,000 lines of code from its monolithic systems and enabled it to create new domain services that are significantly smaller and easier to maintain. 

The modernized system has helped PowerSchool developers move to a better DevOps working model, improving their productivity and work satisfaction. ”In fact, internal polling shows that LaunchDarkly consistently ranks at the top among the developer tools in value add, stability, and developer preference,” notes Hisley.

PowerSchool developers can work on technical improvements on the backend and introduce new features without the need to freeze any functionality. “With LaunchDarkly and AWS, we’re able to move faster in delivering the features that our customers want,” says Hisley.

With the ability to toggle features on and off for specific clients, roll back easily, and test feature changes on a small group of customers before rolling them out to a larger group in real time, PowerSchool can customize and deliver feature updates with confidence. 

PowerSchool looks forward to more opportunities to work with AWS and LaunchDarkly as it continues to modernize its legacy systems.