The Customer
Code Avengers are an online education (EdTech) company based in New Zealand. Code Avengers’ mission is to provide confidence in a digital world. Their online platform provides interactive, gamified courses that teach a broad range of digital skills including computer coding, digital literacy, and design to education institutes and individual learners from 5-18+. To date, their services are available in 6 languages and have been used by over 2 million learners and over 15,000 schools worldwide.
The Challenge
As an NZ home grown tech start-up, Code Avengers built their platform with the best tools available. As they accelerate their global expansion, they looked to improve their cloud infrastructure to support this growth, at the same time supporting their fast-growing customer base. Offering online education courses meant the amount of data being consumed and the number of subscribers to their platform were growing quickly. They needed to be confident that their applications were robust, their infrastructure stable, could perform under pressure and could scale quickly and seamlessly.
Having initially built their platform on Google Cloud, they found their infrastructure cost was too high and they had limited ability to scale and deliver features to their customers at pace. They were looking for a cost-effective solution without compromising on availability and performance.
They also wanted to take a DevOps approach to the delivery and continuous improvement of their new AWS environment and needed to augment their internal skills, as well as upskill their team for the longer term. Last but not least, they wanted to improve their security posture throughout this process to secure their customers' data in the cloud.
The Solution
Code Avengers partners with AC3 Solution Architects to migrate to AWS in delivering a secure and robust infrastructure environment, as well as upskilling their team in DevOps. AC3 delivered a roadmap and cloud strategy aligned to AWS best practices which allowed us to build modern architectures without impacting customer experience. The roadmap included a migration strategy which enabled Code Avengers to experiment, innovate, and scale more quickly, all while providing the most flexible and secure cloud environment.
An Agile methodology was also implemented along with a DevOps approach. The team focused on delivering key improvements to individual components of their AWS infrastructure. Each component was built using Infrastructure-as-Code while incorporating enhancements such as auto-scaling and self-healing into the build.
Security was considered throughout every step of the engagement, with the environment built to best practice security standards ensuring that Code Avengers’ data and their customers’ data remain safe and uncompromised.
Finally, AC3 have supported the growth of the Code Avengers' team not just by upskilling their staff but by helping them recruit top talent to adopt best practices in their platform development, as well as their backend infrastructure.
The Results
Code Avengers has seen many benefits from this engagement, both on a technical and a business level.
The initial move to AWS provided them with a highly resilient and scalable environment which resulted in significant cost savings compared to when they were on the Google Cloud Platform. With AWS’s on-demand solution, they immediately realised savings on their infrastructure costs as they were only billed for the services they were using and not when services were at rest.
With better deployment processes in place, it allowed them to release updates, new features and applications 5x quicker and in a more automated fashion, saving valuable time and company resources.
Another benefit of this solution was an improved customer experience. System reliability increased using multiple Availability Zones, which provided a robust, highly-available, and 'always-on' platform for their customers. Their customers also benefit as their internal teams are now upskilled and empowered to deliver ongoing innovation faster in their new cloud environment.
They enjoy an improved security posture. This benefit is seen day-to-day as part of their cyber security mitigation, but also as they deploy features more often and with greater controls in place.
Finally, Code Avengers are now able to roll out new environments around the world, utilising the Infrastructure-as-Code templates that AC3 built as part of this engagement to assist with their plans for further global growth.
"It can be difficult to keep up with industry standards, but what AC3 helped us with was provide a strategy around how we should move forward and innovate on AWS. They took the pressure off our team around deployment processes and infrastructure challenges which really helped us focus on what matters most; that is delivering new features and content to our users. " - Ray Allen, COO, Code Avengers_