Executive summary:
Challenge: After several years of growth in Spain, numerous educational institutions in Latin America started using Clickedu’s school management application, leading to the company reaching many new users on a new continent, as well as the possibility of expanding to other geographic areas.
Solution: Claranet migrated the Clickedu application to Amazon Web Services, building an elastic, high-availability platform that is capable of automatically scaling in line with resource demands and simultaneous user numbers.
Result: Clickedu benefits from Amazon’s global reach and its high security standards, being able to serve any location with optimum performance. In addition, the Clickedu team now has access to tools which allow them to update their code without interrupting their service.
Clickedu
Clickedu is a cloud-based platform that facilitates the management of all aspects of educational institutions. Founded in 2005, it has been evolving constantly since then and now includes tools for academic, administrative and economic management, digital content and a secure environment for communicating with families. Teachers, students, parents, management and personnel can access the platform from their computers as well as their mobile devices and follow all aspects of day-to-day life at their school.
Clickedu has consolidated itself at the national level and currently provides services for over 400 educational centres in Spain, Andorra, Chile and Columbia, and is expanding rapidly internationally.
The challenge
After an initial period working with a traditional hosting provider, Clickedu contracted Claranet in 2011 to design and manage a cloud platform for them. Claranet built a managed cloud hosting solution, based on their application’s specific requirements, and delivered, across different environments, everything from the ERP to web and email services.
The solution successfully scaled in line with the growth of the application until, at the beginning of 2015, a new requirement emerged as Clickedu was picked up by a large number of educational institutions in Latin America. Considering the rise in traffic that was predicted, as well as the geographic diversity of users who would be accessing the application, Clickedu and Claranet decided to migrate the platform to an infrastructure platform with global reach: Amazon Web Services.
The objectives of the migration were the following:
- Create an elastic platform that scales automatically according to levels of concurrent users and resource consumption.
- Use version repositories to facilitate deployments and updates without affecting users.
- Guarantee maximum security and longevity for user data by archiving versions in S3 and using high-availability databases.
- Monitor the application to verify that it is functioning correctly and to predict what changes will be necessary.
- Use technologies such as Lambda to execute code in the cloud, lowering costs and improving performance.
The solution
After studying the application in detail, evolving the source code and performing a test-of-concept on how it would function on AWS, Claranet proposed a cloud solution composed of the following elements:
- Deployment on a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with high availability and replication across different AWS data centres.
- Autoscaling for the application and version deployment without any impact on the users.
- High-availability data centres that can be recovered with rollback and that can be scaled vertically without interrupting the service.
- Central consolidation of the application and service logs for the analysis of the registry files.
- Use of technologies such as Docker and Lambda to optimize costs as well as improve parallelization and performance.
- Integrated development through orchestration systems that allow for guaranteed replication of the solution in record time.
The change of platform lets us grow freely anywhere in the world, with all the advantages of Amazon Web Services and maximum security. Seeing how the servers scale up in real time according to how many users are on Clickedu is magical, almost impossible to believe.”
Ignasi Nogués
Managing Director, Clickedu
Benefits
The cloud solution designed by Claranet provides Clickedu with the highest levels of availability, security and flexibility, and enables them to offer an optimal service in any new geographic location and to any number of users, which is a crucial accompaniment to the international expansion of the application. Betting confidently on innovation, and how that effects the whole process, Clickedu have been able to construct an elaborate and efficient project that measures up to the real needs of the application.
Equally, their team is much more agile when testing and deploying versions of their code – which they can now accomplish without interrupting the service – and has access to new work tools for everything from recovering files to testing and analysis. In addition, the joint work carried out by both teams and the constant improvement of the solution together guarantee the evolution of the application and the platform, in terms of size as well as complexity. In this way, they are always making the most of the advantages of working with an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner.
Thanks to Claranet’s managed solution, Clickedu has succeeded in harnessing the benefits of a global cloud infrastructure like Amazon Web Services, and maintaining a single, local, technical point of contact that knows their application, their team and their business model.