Case Study: Deployment of an AWS environment for a phonics teaching platform

THE CLIENT

Our client offers books and literacy resources to schools for their classrooms and libraries.

Their phonics teaching platform is a new online resource supported by a programme of decodable phonics readers. It has been developed by experienced teachers, currently working in the classroom, and is supported with Continuing Professional Development (CPD) training.

THE CHALLENGE

The programme was based on the Django web framework developed by a third-party supplier.

Our client approached us as they needed a robust, secure, scalable, and affordable approach to hosting their phonics teaching programme.

… and it all needed to be live within two weeks!

OUR APPROACH

We decided to host the application within Amazon Web Services (AWS). Polar Moment is proud to be a Consulting Partner with AWS.

The first step was to transfer the existing domain to Amazon’s Route53 DNS service.

Polar Moment created an AWS account and built the infrastructure required to host the application within AWS’s London region. This included the creation of a virtual private cloud to isolate the resources and then the service necessary to deploy the programme.

These resources included:

An application load balancer with the domain security certificate installed (managed by AWS Certificate Manager).
An EC2 instance to run the Django web server and an auto-scaling group to handle peaks in load.

The database was created in RDS and S3 was used for storing the media. The CloudFront content delivery network was used to deliver the content to end users.

Paul Deed, CTO of Polar Moment commented: “The customer approached us with some very compressed timescales to move their service from development to a production environment, ready for a launch. Our team were able to quickly understand the client’s hosting requirements including security, geographic availability, user volumes, and scalability. We built an AWS environment capable of hosting the anticipated workload, which can now scale as needed”.

THE RESULTS

Polar Moment trained both the client and the third-party developer in how to access the AWS environment and deploy the Django-based application.

The monitoring of the infrastructure and its health was automated by Polar Moment. Alerts in CloudWatch are sent to the client for action as and when needed.

The infrastructure provided by Polar Moment on AWS continues to deliver the reliable, secure, and performant service required by our client’s customers.

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