Massive School System Embraces Cloud on Fast Schedule

The client is one of the largest K-12 school systems in the US with an annual budget in the billions supporting over 700,000 students.

Due to COVID-19, the school system had an urgent need to develop a new student registration application on AWS in two weeks. The district had been using Azure and had just started with Azure DevOps, but had no experience with AWS, containers or deep experience with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).

The school system engaged with AWS for discussions to find the right third-party partner to deliver their objectives within the tight timeline. AWS brought us into the opportunity to assist them with this urgent project.

InterVision had led a previous Palo Alto Networks (PAN) and F5 deployment with the company, which included scripting. As a result of this earlier engagement, the company knew of our expertise to execute with quality on a tight timeline and trusted us as challengers to the status quo. They viewed InterVision as a strategic partner when it came to security automation, so we were a good candidate for the project.

The InterVision team worked quickly to create a prototype for the school system that was delivered the following Monday morning. We coordinated with their IT team to containerize the .NET Core application and deploy it in AWS on ECS using a Blue Green Deployment and native AWS CI/CD pipeline (using CodePipeline, CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy). We implemented ECR (Elastic Container Registry) to store, manage and deploy the docker container images, a solution that was deployed into a multi-availability zone environment for fault tolerance and load balancing (using an AWS Application load balancer, autoscaling group and ECS) accessing data in a AWS RDS PostgreSQL database. We also assisted in penetration testing, as well as code and infrastructure hardening, and we designed a multi-cloud CI/CD pipeline from Azure to AWS to assist with migrations.

The Student Intake app went live within the intended timeline and their IT team has since made multiple deployments to improve the student intake application, gaining excellent user feedback. Automatically scaled, they achieved 20,000 applications in a single day, which allowed the district to serve its students during the pandemic. The client and AWS were extremely impressed with our pace and ability to herd multiple activities into a cohesive momentum, so the project could hit its deadline with a quality rollout.

 

AWS solutions utilized:

AWS cloud

CodePipeline

CodeCommit

CodeBuild

CodeDeploy

AWS RDS PostgreSQL database