White Rose Education Drives Innovation in UK Schools by Launching EdTech Solutions on AWS 100% Faster with CirrusHQ

White Rose Education is improving math and science teaching in K-12 schools across the UK using educational technology (EdTech). The organization provides schools and teachers with content to support their math and science curriculums. The provided materials include videos, presentations, parent and pupil home learning guides, and tests to check students’ progress. Eighty percent of UK primary schools and 40 percent of UK secondary schools use its resources.

“We never considered ourselves an EdTech company,” says Tony Staneff, founder of White Rose Education. “But after 2020—when demand for our services spiked due to home learning—we understood how important IT was to our future.” To handle the rise in demand for its resources, White Rose Education migrated its technology from a hosted on-premises data center to Amazon Web Services (AWS). It began using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) virtual instances and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to serve and process data. “We gained the scalability and performance we needed to ensure our content was constantly available to teachers and pupils regardless of how many needed access,” Staneff says.

White Rose Education believes the opportunities for technology in education are multiplying. But Staneff feels that education is trailing in its adoption compared to other sectors. He explains, “The world is changing through technology, and the pace of change in education will accelerate. One area is going to be more adaptive assessments.”

To ensure preparedness for the future, White Rose Education wanted to modernize its AWS architecture. It aimed to move to serverless, cloud-native services that reduced costs and increased agility. Staneff and his IT team immediately turned to AWS Partner CirrusHQ, which helped White Rose Education with its initial migration to the cloud. “We have a great relationship with CirrusHQ. The team there guides us on our AWS strategy,” Staneff says.

CirrusHQ was founded as an AWS specialist. Stephen Croke, chief revenue officer at CirrusHQ, says, “AWS—it’s what we’re experts in.” The company has developed skill sets and driven growth through AWS Partner Programs. CirrusHQ holds multiple AWS certifications and validations to highlight its capabilities.

It is part of the AWS Public Sector Partner Program, which highlights partners with cloud-based solutions and experience supporting the public sector. Through the program, CirrusHQ has achieved the Education Competency, which demonstrates its deep technical knowledge in the education sector and proven customer success stories. “Having the certifications and AWS Competency Programs are invaluable. They’re differentiators that separate us for our technical skills and make it easier for us to win customers like White Rose Education,” states Croke.

CirrusHQ engaged with White Rose Education to deliver its modernization architecture. For greater scalability, CirrusHQ divided the existing monolithic application into three bespoke containerized applications. The partner also made the infrastructure serverless from end to end, with AWS Fargate managing the application containers.

For greater database performance, the new architecture also features Amazon Aurora, which offers five times the throughput of MySQL and three times that of PostgreSQL. The architecture retains Amazon CloudFront as the content delivery network to securely deliver White Rose Education resources to end users at low latency. “Crucially, our new modernized infrastructure provides the scalability to support growth today, tomorrow, and for years to come,” says Staneff.

With its cloud-native infrastructure, White Rose Education lowered its cloud spend on AWS by 70 percent. “Like all businesses, we need to keep control over expenditure as we grow,” comments Staneff. “Achieving such a significant cost savings through modernization highlights the effectiveness of being cloud native on AWS.”

In addition to saving on costs, the organization also gained greater scalability and saw a 60 percent increase in performance. As a result, teachers and students gain fast and reliable access to White Rose Education’s resources during the school day regardless of the number of current users. “AWS helps us maintain trust with the schools that rely on us to help create a deep understanding in math and science among students,” says Staneff.

White Rose Education’s IT team can launch new products into the market faster because of a DevOps capability that sprang from its work with CirrusHQ. DevOps allows greater collaboration across the software development lifecycle, minimizing the risk of zero-day issues when applications go live. “The separation of concerns in the DevOps architecture means teams can work on multiple projects simultaneously. This has increased our productivity by 60 percent,” says Kenny Thompson, head of digital development at White Rose Education.

Improved development efficiency helped White Rose Education launch its new digital resource, White Rose Infinity, 100 percent faster. The resource, designed to revolutionize math training, is a significant step forward in the organization’s use of technology to support teachers and students. Running on AWS, White Rose Infinity helps teachers create bespoke worksheets for personalized learning and easily launch digital quizzes, with the platform generating questions for students. “Within a couple of weeks of its launch, the platform had generated 200,000 questions for students,” comments Staneff.

He's looking forward to continuing to develop White Rose Infinity on AWS with the support of CirrusHQ. Staneff wants to see how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) could add new capabilities to the platform. He concludes, “The range of AI and ML services on AWS is increasing, and we want to work with CirrusHQ to develop our use cases. It’s an exciting time for us.”