Executive Summary

As a worldwide-known e-learning industry leader, our client provides cutting-edge digital learning management solutions serving millions of learners globally. The Matoffo team developed a scalable and resilient infrastructure that enables the client to deliver personalized learning experiences with exceptional performance.

About the Customer

The customer is a global leader in the e-learning industry, providing a cutting-edge digital learning management platform that delivers personalized learning experiences. Their platform serves millions of learners across multiple industries, offering advanced course management, real-time analytics, and collaboration tools. The company supports educational institutions, corporate training programs, and individual learners worldwide.

Customer Challenge

Our client is a growing EdTech company with approximately 150 employees, offering an online learning management platform to 80,000 monthly active users across corporate training and university extension programs. They run on AWS but rely on legacy, manual deployment scripts for new releases.

Key Business Challenges

1. Frequent Downtime & Disruption: Each release took 3–4 hours of partial downtime, forcing the company to schedule updates late at night or on weekends. This meant delays in rolling out new course modules, causing missed revenue opportunities from time-sensitive training contracts.

From a business standpoint, the slow rollouts, downtime, and performance problems eroded user satisfaction, constrained new contracts, and put the EdTech startup’s growth roadmap at risk.

Why AWS

AWS provides a complete suite of container orchestration services through Amazon ECS, which simplifies deployment processes while ensuring scalability and reliability. AWS Fargate, as a serverless compute engine, eliminates the need to manage the underlying infrastructure, significantly reducing operational overhead.

Integrated tools like AWS CodeDeploy enable seamless Blue/Green deployments with zero downtime, while Amazon RDS ensures high availability and fault tolerance for database operations. Amazon ElastiCache and CloudFront enhance application responsiveness and reduce latency through caching and global content delivery.

With its pay-as-you-go model, AWS ensures cost-effectiveness by enabling precise resource utilization while auto-scaling capabilities dynamically adjust capacity to meet fluctuating demand. This combination of services and tools makes AWS an ideal choice for building scalable, resilient, and efficient architectures.

Why Matoffo

Matoffo’s expertise in AWS and DevOps practices made it the ideal partner for this modernization initiative. With a proven track record of delivering robust and scalable solutions for global platforms, Matoffo brought a client-centric approach focused on achieving operational excellence and cost-efficiency.

By leveraging infrastructure automation and adopting industry best practices, Matoffo implemented a highly available and scalable architecture that met the client’s growing needs. Matoffo’s deep understanding of the e-learning industry’s unique requirements ensured a tailored solution that supported uninterrupted learning experiences for users worldwide.

Matoffo Solution

To address these issues, we designed and implemented a DevOps transformation centered around AWS-native services, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and best practices in CI/CD:

AWS-Centric Architecture

1. Containerized Microservices on ECS (Fargate)
   • Broke the monolithic application into smaller services (e.g., “Course Delivery,” “Payments,” “Analytics”) so each could scale independently.
   • Defined ECS task parameters using Terraform for consistency across Dev, Stage, and Production environments.
2. Data Layer Optimization
   • Migrated the database to Amazon RDS (MySQL) with a Multi-AZ configuration, ensuring high availability.
   • Enabled read replicas for analytics-heavy queries, offloading traffic from the primary instance.

CI/CD Implementation & Best Practices

1. Automated Pipeline with AWS CodePipeline
   • Source Stage: Integrated with GitHub, triggering a pipeline run upon pull requests or merges.
   • Build Stage: AWS CodeBuild compiles the code, runs unit tests (Jest or PyTest), and performs security scans (Dependabot).
   • Test Stage: Automated integration tests; a “smoke test” environment is provisioned on demand.
   • Deploy Stage:
     • Blue/Green Deployments on ECS (via AWS CodeDeploy) avoid downtime by routing traffic to new tasks only after passing health checks.
     • Rolling Updates in lower environments for faster iteration.
2. Fast Feedback Loop
   • Pre-Commit Hooks (Husky/ESLint): Enforce coding standards before pushing to the remote repository.
   • SonarQube (Optional): Provides code quality analysis and enforces coverage thresholds.
   • Automated Environment Provisioning: Temporary test environments spin up for integration and load tests, then tear down to control costs.
3. Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
   • Terraform modules define VPC, ECS tasks, RDS, and other resources.
   • Versioned IaC ensures environment parity and enables quick rollbacks if infrastructure changes introduce errors.

High-level solution diagram

High-level deployment diagram

CI/CD diagram

Business Value

Deployment & Availability

• Deployment Time: Reduced from 3–4 hours of partial downtime to under 20 minutes with no downtime.
• Deployment Frequency: Shifted from monthly releases to 2–3 per week, allowing faster feature delivery and updates to course content.

Business Outcomes

• Cost Savings: Reduced monthly AWS spend by ~25% (approx. $2k–$3k less per month).

Client's Feedback

“Matoffo’s implementation has transformed our platform’s performance and scalability. The new architecture has not only improved our user experience with faster response times but also significantly reduced our operational costs. We can now focus on expanding our educational offerings instead of managing infrastructure.”