Diwa delivers digital learning with 24x7 access for over 300,000 learners

For more than four decades, Diwa has provided print and digital classroom resources for schools in the Philippines. Until 2020, its e-learning tools were primarily used in classrooms, computer labs, and after-school programs, although a number of schools had already begun experimenting with blended learning through dedicated e-learning days. This growing interest led Diwa to start evolving its systems to support rising digital expectations.

When the pandemic abruptly shifted the entire country to online learning in 2020, Diwa had to accelerate this long-term transition. The company faced urgent demand from hundreds of schools that needed reliable, on-demand digital learning for students across all grade levels, prompting Diwa to scale its interactive platform much faster than originally planned.

In July 2020, building on its earlier migration efforts that began in 2019, Diwa intensified its cloud journey to expand capacity and improve scalability, and chose to collaborate with AWS. Diwa also engaged AWS Partner Cloud Ready Technologies to help quickly rearchitect its infrastructure and migrate in line with best practices. Ana Alipit, vice-president of eLearning at Diwa Learning Systems, says, “It was truly a team effort between AWS, Cloud Ready Technologies, and our IT team to optimize the code for our systems and take charge of the end-to-end planning process.”

The team analyzed the specific context and provided valuable DevOps input, advising Diwa to decouple its architecture into application and web servers with a database tier—a more modular approach that would improve agility. The company implemented Amazon FSx for Windows File Server for high-performance application storage and worked closely with AWS solutions architects to test managed databases, eventually migrating to Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling with Elastic Load Balancing. This approach reduced database administration costs and enabled core applications to remain stateless. Developers isolated multiple databases, each supporting a few schools with path-based routing.

Liz Payofelin, vice president for IT at Diwa Learning Systems, comments, “The most impactful change was the decision to couple schools into subsets within the platform. This new architecture supports autoscaling while reducing the risk of our database servers becoming a single point of failure. After the proof-of-concept phase, small groups—each responsible for two or three schools—began user-testing the LMS from both teacher and student perspectives. This approach made it possible to identify and resolve any lags or downtime early, ensuring the system was stable and ready before going live for the September school start.”

Throughout each phase,AWS teams advised on potential configuration changes to help the platform handle extreme traffic surges during exam periods.. Developers also attended dedicated AWS training sessions to optimize their LMS architecture. These sessions informed several cost-saving decisions, including shifting from on-demand instances to Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances and moving from Intel-based instances to AMD-based servers on AWS.

Diwa successfully transitioned to a scalable cloud-native infrastructure in just over two months, ensuring uninterrupted access to digital learning for more than 300,000 students when the school year resumed in September. “Even with double or sometimes triple the demand, we’re able to consistently deliver LMS services at the same level of availability and performance as before,” Alipit shares. Existing student and teacher accounts were moved across to the new platform without interruptions. “The success of the migration gave us confidence that our LMS can support future growth,” adds Payofelin.

Moving to the cloud also helped Diwa to minimize maintenance overhead, with an estimated 50 percent cost savings versus an on-premises architecture. The efficiency gains achieved on AWS allowed the company to reassign staff to strengthen helpdesk operations, supporting the surge in phone and chat inquiries once the digital learning mandate went live in the Philippines.

The time saved from managing workloads on AWS created room for more innovation. Diwa implemented Amazon Q Developer, a generative AI assistant for software development, to support the maintenance and improvement of other digital products such as Checkbox, a gamified assessment portal. The company is also working with AWS to develop additional teacher training modules. “We’ve become much more agile and efficient on AWS, which has accelerated our innovation,” Payofelin concludes. “The speed and dedication of our tech team in setting up this migration, in collaboration with Cloud Ready and AWS, have been key to our success.”