Squla Modernizes Online Education Platform, Saves Costs Using AWS

E-learning provider Squla has been an AWS user from its inception. That gave the company the flexibility it needed to optimize its cloud services quickly after COVID-19-related school lockdowns led to skyrocketing demand for its online platform for schoolchildren. With the number of users on the site suddenly increasing by a factor of 20, it knew it needed to change how it used AWS to accommodate spikes in demand and future growth needs.
Squla also recognized that its platform would benefit from moving from a monolithic IT architecture to a more modern, flexible one based on microservices, which would make application updates easier and faster. However, that migration would have to wait until after it addressed the immediate scaling challenges it faced while serving the remote education demands of millions of children.
By modernizing its architecture and moving to serverless, Squla also hoped its engineering team would be able to develop and roll out new features more quickly. Using microservices, developers would no longer have to wait for others on the team to complete their updates but could deploy changes in a more modular fashion. For example, a new feature involving eight microservices could be partially rolled out if one microservice required more development time but the other seven were ready to deploy.

After school lockdowns began and it struggled to accommodate user numbers, Squla’s engineers worked to optimize how its applications were configured on AWS to increase the number of processes its infrastructure could run. The company turned to Oblivion for the additional expertise it needed to adapt its MySQL database for higher user loads.

Working with Oblivion, Squla was also able to identify other opportunities to make improvements in the near term, but one recommendation would have to wait: migrating its database to Amazon Aurora, which is designed for unparalleled high performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. Squla didn’t want to risk breaking the vital services its platform was providing by making that move in the middle of the high-pressure lockdown environment. “That was not the right moment for us to do it,” says Jagadeesh Annamalai, head of engineering at Squla.

After addressing its immediate optimization needs to manage increased user demands, Squla was ready to modernize its infrastructure and migrate to Amazon Aurora. With support from Oblivion and AWS, Squla assessed its existing architecture and conducted an AWS Well-Architected review, which helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for a variety of applications and workloads. The review is built around six pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability.

Based on the results of that review, Squla rearchitected and migrated its systems from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload, to Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service that makes it easy to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications.

This included using AWS Fargate—a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine that lets you focus on building applications without managing servers—to deploy new microservices. The move to microservices produced quick results. With Squla’s previous monolithic architecture, updates were delayed if even a single new feature created issues that required further testing. But with a microservices-based pipeline, Squla can roll out each new feature independently. This speeds development and deployment, improves efficiency, and enables the developer team to respond faster to changing user needs.

Using microservices also eliminates the risk of a single point of failure—the previous monolithic architecture meant that, if one service failed, none of Squla’s services would work. As a result, modernization has brought a decline in the number of complaints and customer service requests from parents and teachers using the platform. “The stability and reliability of the product has been improved a lot,” says Annamalai.

Using serverless, Squla eliminated roadblocks for developers and reduced its costs by 23 percent. “Now, we have a lot of smaller microservices,” says Annamalai. “So if one application is blocked, it’s not going to block the rest of the applications going into production. It’s a win from the business development point of view. That’s a big benefit for us.”
 

With a more efficient microservices-based infrastructure and improved scalability, Squla’s engineers now have more time to focus on innovating features and services. And onboarding new developers is significantly faster—it previously took 3 months before someone could begin using the entire system, but new people can now start building new features for individual microservices in just 2 weeks.

The company is also exploring ways to use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to provide teachers and parents with more insights about how their children are learning on the platform. “We now have room to think about, ‘What is the next big thing we can do with our product?’” says Annamalai. “It opens up new opportunities for us.”