Snappet Boosts Uptime and Scalability, Improves Service to Teachers and Students Using AWS

Snappet’s driving goal has always been simple: improve teaching and learning through technology. And its e-learning platform—which allows teachers to plan lessons, tailor learning, and monitor performance—has proved a great success, quickly going from prototype to launching across the Netherlands, and then Europe and the US.

Each time the company needed to onboard a new school to the platform, Snappet’s IT team would onboard new schools in centralized databases. However, with growing demand, this monolithic architecture was struggling to keep up. Plus, Snappet was now running applications not just for teachers and students, but for administrators and support staff too. Availability had become an issue, and Snappet’s engineering teams were increasingly interrupted by the need for manual work to keep the platform running.

The team decided to scale horizontally, clustering schools across multiple database systems. Although this solved performance and availability issues, it impeded innovation. “We needed to increase development speed, so we added teams,” says Klaas Waslander, chief technical officer of Snappet. “We added lots of features, but we quickly saw that we couldn’t work with multiple teams in one central web application—it wouldn’t be possible to keep innovating quickly due to the monolithic architecture with centralized database systems. We needed a way to let multiple teams develop in parallel.”

Looking for a new approach, Snappet engaged with AWS solution architects for advice. “It helped us review our IT environment as well as our organizational architecture,” says Waslander. “We knew we had all the tools we needed in the AWS Cloud to help our developers work in a more efficient and innovative way.”

With the objective of tripling development capacity, Snappet started restructuring its environment around microservices. “We created multi-accounts on AWS and set up DevOps teams that could use whatever tools were best suited to their needs,” says Waslander.

Instead of the centralized database systems that the company launched with, Snappet has migrated to a microservices-based architecture with multiple databases. These include Amazon Aurora, which provides unparalleled high performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility, and Amazon DynamoDB, a serverless, NoSQL, fully managed database service with single-digit millisecond response times. Some development teams choose to go serverless with AWS Lambda to run code without thinking about servers or clusters. Others use Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), which can run highly secure, reliable, and scalable containers.

According to Waslander, the new setup is transforming the way Snappet operates. “Using AWS, we’re able to scale when and where needed,” he says. “Developers can innovate, test, and deploy without getting in each other’s way. And platform security is improved because data and services are clearly segmented. This also simplifies disaster recovery because if a service fails it’s easy to launch new instances to restore functionality.”

He adds, “On the business side, the multi-account setup is also giving us better insight into who is using what services, allowing us to apply FinOps principles to ensure efficient use of resources.”

And although Snappet hasn’t looked back with its new architecture, it continues to benefit from advice and assistance from AWS Partners. “We have a lot of smart, independently minded people here and it seems we did a lot right,” says Waslander, after the AWS Partner helped the team conduct an AWS Well-Architected review to check its infrastructure against best practices. “It was great to confirm we’re still on the right track. Plus, we got some good advice to improve the organization overall.”

Reliability issues are now a thing of the past, supporting Snappet’s mission of making excellent teaching easier. Teachers can deliver engaging lessons without interruption and students have a better learning experience with access to all the resources and tools they need. Thanks to help from AWS, Snappet also knows that it complies with strict privacy regulations. And, having tripled development capacity thanks to the new DevOps model, features are more frequently deployed, constantly improving the functionality of the e-learning platform for users.

The company’s developers are happier too. “They can run their projects as they see fit, with the resources they need,” says Waslander. “They don’t have to submit proposals to me or an architecture committee and wait. They can just get on with delivering secure and privacy-first EdTech innovations.”