Toddle Collaborates with AWS to Optimize Online Learning Platform in a Competitive Market

The usage of online learning platforms in schools, colleges, and universities worldwide is on the rise. By 2027, the global e-learning industry is projected to reach $64.5 billion, with 900 million users. India-based teaching and learning platform Toddle has experienced explosive growth in line with this trend. "In just three years, our customer base has surged from one K-12 school to over 1,500," says Toddle's co-founder and CTO, Nikhil Poonawala.

Toddle has relied on Amazon Web Services (AWS) from the outset, building its infrastructure with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) virtual server instances in its initial stages. As the platform expanded, Toddle transitioned to AWS Lambda serverless functions, streamlining scaling and minimizing management. "Thanks to the move to AWS Lambda, our infrastructure team is only a quarter of the size of a company operating with traditional server architecture," notes Poonawala. "This allows us to focus our attention to product development."

After the migration, Toddle extended its platform across multiple AWS Regions in Europe, the United States, Australia, and the Middle East. This allowed the company to expand its business in these markets and comply with data sovereignty regulations. "Thanks to AWS, we were able to save several months of work as the platform supports the compliance requirements we need, including GDPR," says Poonawala.

With the rollouts complete, Toddle turned its attention back to optimizing its AWS infrastructure. "We constantly strive to enhance our operations and work more efficiently," notes Poonawala. He continues, "At Toddle, we take pride in our platform's user-friendliness and how it serves as a comprehensive solution for educators, encompassing curriculum planning, student portfolios, progress reports, and communications. However, given the highly competitive nature of the marketplace, it's important that we prioritize development over platform management."

In May 2022, at the SXSW conference in Austin, Deepanshu Arora, co-founder and CEO of Toddle, engaged in a conversation with the AWS team regarding cost optimization. This led to discussions on potential areas for optimization, with AWS identifying Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) as two services where improvements could be made.

As Toddle onboarded more customers, data transfers on Amazon CloudFront between the platform and its clients were on the verge of exceeding 50 TB a month. Poonawala notes that the figure continued to rise, reaching 50 percent during August and December when the academic year began. The AWS team proposed Amazon CloudFront Custom Pricing, which included a minimum data transfer commitment of only 50 TB per month. "When we switched to Amazon CloudFront Custom Pricing, we saw a savings of 30–40 percent on our Amazon CloudFront bill right away. It was a huge relief for us and allowed us to focus on what really matters, improving our platform for our users," says Poonawala.

Toddle then collaborated with AWS to optimize the way it utilized Amazon RDS, which underpins most of the platform's applications. As the number of customers and volume of data increased, Toddle had to upgrade its Amazon RDS instance type to maintain optimal performance. AWS provided guidance on reconfiguring the Toddle architecture to implement read replicas, which alleviated the load on instances by offloading read requests. "Thanks to the support from AWS, we were able to reduce our Amazon RDS expenses by roughly 25 percent and decrease latency by 15 percent," explains Poonawala.

The time and cost reductions resulting from Toddle's collaboration with AWS have allowed the company to focus more resources on development, which has always been a key goal for the company. "Having more resources to figure out how we can better serve our customers is essential to our business," says Poonawala. "Our aim is to make our platform more comprehensive and intuitive for users, and the ability to develop our product and get improvements into the market faster will give us a competitive edge."

Over the last six months, Toddle has made significant progress in expanding its services. The platform has extended its coverage beyond K-10 to include grade 11 and 12 students. Additionally, Toddle has introduced attendance and timetabling features to its learning management system, providing more comprehensive functionality for both teachers and students. To support students' academic journeys, Toddle has also added a feature for generating academic transcripts. These developments demonstrate Toddle's ongoing commitment to providing a comprehensive and accessible education platform for learners of all ages and backgrounds.

Looking ahead, the Toddle IT team is exploring how Amazon Aurora Serverless—an on-demand, autoscaling configuration for the Amazon Aurora database service—could support the business by further lowering infrastructure management. Additionally, Toddle is evaluating Amazon Athena to analyze platform data traffic, and integrating Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) for real-time analytics.

Poonawala believes his company’s future plans reflect the great relationship it enjoys with AWS. He adds that the proactiveness of the AWS team is as good as he’s seen from any IT solution provider. The co-founder remains optimistic about the future and the value of partnership with AWS. Poonawala says, “We receive proposals from other cloud providers regularly, but we’ll stick with AWS because of its positive impact on our development, strong support, and innovative solutions.”