AWS Cloud Solution.

Sanoma Learning has reached the point where they need to be able to handle up to 120,000 users throughout The Netherlands at the same time on their learning platform Bingel.

The challenge is being able to quickly scale server capacity because of time-based peak loads in the number of concurrent Bingel platform sessions. Can our Team Rockstars IT Software Developers help our client?

By building various SW products and consulting Sanoma Learning about the possibilities of AWS, our developers can help the company get ready for dynamic scaling.

At busy times the team uses (m5.xlarge) EC2 instances, usually about 10 at once. On those instances they also have Mongo DB running, where almost everything (from content to created sums and tasks) is stored. The size of Mongo DB (per replica server) is on average 2 to 3 TB per 1 school year.

Sanoma Learning also use an Elasticache Redis cluster, usually with 1 (m4.large) node, for session management. The role of the development team in managing this is limited: sometimes the team has to manually scale up a bit or investigate which instances are busy and why.

Furthermore, setting up all the new items and services that the Development Team needs in AWS is managed by the Core Infrastructure Team within Sanoma Learning.

The biggest achievement for Sanoma Learning and the IT teams is the automatic scaling based on dynamic usage by students and teachers.

In addition, by adopting services such as MongoDB and ElastiCache for Redis the platform and application can be seamlessly linked with the EC2 instances, and can be scaled separately. Moreover this made a number of security improvements possible.

The IT teams now also have different DTAP environments side by side where different configurations can be deployed and tested.

Finally, Sanoma Learning can do massive load tests on AWS: they have scripts and docker images ready to run as test instances. This allows them to validate that the application can handle many users at the same time.