SchoolPass, a school management and automation platform, faced the challenge of handling burst traffic during school arrival and dismissal while also maintaining momentum in feature development with their existing, traditional n-tier architecture. Due to brittle, bespoke deployment tooling and a lack of automatic provisioning and scaling, developers and the operations team were flooded by manual work and outages and unable to afford the time to implement modern tooling, automation, and a highly-available and scalable architecture.
SchoolPass
Rearchitected the core platform using modern cloud-native architecture practices.
Challenge
Our Approach
SchoolPass partnered with Rearc to design and implement a scalable, highly-available, and cloud-native architecture for a new, high-value feature for the SchoolPass platform. In addition to assisting SchoolPass to release this new feature on an architecture designed to scale with their customers, our goal was to provide a proof-of-concept which demonstrated to the SchoolPass team how their platform could be implemented in a scalable, highly-available, and secure manner on AWS with infrastructure as code, continuous integration, and continuous delivery.
Solution
Working directly with the SchoolPass engineering team, we implemented a distributed services architecture which satisfied the scalability, availability, and security objectives of the SchoolPass team. We implemented this design using a variety of AWS services including Lambda functions, API Gateway, ECS, and messaging with SQS and SNS. All infrastructure and application code was built, tested, and deployed automatically via CI and CD pipelines in their existing DevOps projects giving confidence to the engineering team and stakeholders that features could be delivered reliably to customers.
Outcome
This solution demonstrated how to implement the SchoolPass platform in a cloud-native manner, and also provided the SchoolPass engineers with insight into their systems that was previously lacking as well as the ability to adjust scaling targets in multiple places based on this insight. All infrastructure was defined and provisioned with Terraform and application code built, tested, and deployed automatically. This allows engineers to focus on delivering value for their customers rather than be mired in shoring up production systems and responding to outages.
