How Divio Transformed Social Schools’ SaaS Application Architecture

Social Schools engaged our expertise in cloud computing in education to address their critical architecture challenges effectively. They were in a familiar predicament faced by many organizations of having an application that outgrew its original architecture. Performance was suffering, which in turn was affecting the experience of their clients and increasing pressure on the team.

Vinit Kumar, the Staff Engineer at Social Schools, has specifically built monitoring tools and special systems unique to Social Schools on top of the Divio CLI or API. He has created an easy-to-use monitoring system for every single website Social Schools handles—which is thousands of websites.

A Look At Their Application and How It Was Built

Social Schools’ application helps clients connect with a wide user base, with individual, private networks being set up for individual educational institutions. Social Schools’ multi-tenant, single application was built with djangoCMS and a single database. When it was originally developed, it was not built with the scaling capabilities Social Schools would need as its business grew.

The database initially designed did not account for the scalability required as the company expanded. The main difficulty faced by Social Schools revolved around performance problems. Specifically, the sluggish speeds experienced by their applications. Social Schools offers a wide range of features and caters to numerous users. However, their growth in users was causing their application to perform more slowly. When one of their websites received excessive traffic, it had an impact on other websites. This resulted in Vinit spending more than six hours backing up and restoring the database, a very time-consuming task. And with a total of 2,000 domains spanning across hundreds of applications, these performance issues were becoming an increasing problem.

The Challenges They Faced

As Social School's user base expanded, their infrastructure started to show cracks. Performance problems grew more frequent, with sluggish speeds affecting the experience of schools, students, and parents.

One of the biggest pain points was that traffic surges on one website could slow down others. This meant Vinit was often forced into lengthy manual tasks like spending six hours backing up and restoring a single database. With more than 2,000 domains across hundreds of applications, these problems were only getting worse.

Issue 1: Rising Costs

Due to the application's modest configuration, Social Schools found themselves in a tricky situation. They would need to invest in high-quality servers and databases to ensure optimal performance. The only way to avoid speed issues was to pay for a private server. However, this upgrade would come at a substantial cost that wasn’t on the table.

Issue 2: Support Needs

Resolving support requests with the previous cloud provider Heroku was time-consuming and frustrating. Social Schools could only avoid this by upgrading to an expensive paid plan, which was not cost-effective. Vinit remembers multiple instances during his time with Heroku when downtime issues occurred after midnight, forcing him to interrupt his sleep to resolve service disruptions. The lack of support during these late hours was incredibly stressful and exhausting. Living in a different time zone made communication and assistance even more problematic.

Issue 3: Unexpected Downtime

Social Schools had a shared infrastructure with Heroku, their previous cloud provider. As previously noted, a private server would be too expensive. The problem with shared tenancy is that Social School’s application could have downtime if another tenant’s availability went down because of issues on their end. And this happened, at one point for two hours total. This had a detrimental effect on both the customers and the team.

Issue 4: Team Size

Social Schools’ team was just too small to migrate themselves and do everything on AWS without external support. This wasn’t an option from the get-go –if they had to go that route, they would have had to dedicate a considerable amount of development hours to configuring and sustaining the infrastructure themselves.

The Solution: How Did Divio Help?

Divio’s expert cloud solutions in the education sector helped Social Schools by developing a new cloud infrastructure for their SaaS application to migrate to. We also built in features to future-proof it and allow for growth as Social Schools gained more customers. Here are six benefits that our solution brought:

Divio Solution 1: Simple Migration

Social Schools were eager to emphasize the simplicity of transitioning to the Divio platform. The cloud migration was smooth, with Divio doing the heavy lifting. This made the whole process far more straightforward without causing bottlenecks that would need to be retroactively fixed. The Social Schools team also commented on the continuing proactive support from the Divio team post-migration.

Divio Solution 2: Mirrors Functionality

Social Schools is now able to maintain over 2,800 domains for over 680 websites on a single code base with Divio’s web app mirroring functionality. It also helps distribute traffic coming from users accessing different platforms on the Social Schools applications. Another benefit is how much faster cloud database backups and restoration now take. All-in-all, what was once a complicated architecture has become far easier to manage and grow.

Divio Solution 3: Easy Monitoring

Divio's scan functionality has enabled Social Schools to monitor their applications and web pages much more easily. Not only has this meant that they can keep a closer eye on performance, both for the individual platforms and overall system, but means detecting problems, and resolving them, has become far quicker. Overall, the monitoring and troubleshooting process has been simplified, saving both time, money, and effort and providing a better service for their end users.

Divio Solution 4: Meeting Customer Needs

Social Schools’ updated application was built using Divio CLI and API. Divio’s own toolkit and integrations offer an expansive range of capabilities, and one of the major benefits of this was that they are now able to meet specific customer needs. This may be a new scheduling tool, contact form, or so on. This level of customization means that Social Schools can now offer a more bespoke end product to their clients, meeting greater levels of customer satisfaction. This has the wider effect of fortifying a strong reputation for potential new clients.

Divio Solution 5: Improved Performance; from 2 hours to 10 minutes

The new Social Schools application improved in speed, efficiency, and cost management via the implementation of effective API provisioning and automation. Previously the process of developing new client platforms took at least two hours. But now this has been drastically reduced to 10 minutes. Quite a significant difference! This means less pressure on the team, and the increased bandwidth to take on other tasks (and onboard new clients!).

Divio Solution 6: Data Security

Social Schools' product stores a huge amount of sensitive data and private media assets for multiple organizations. As such, safeguarding this data is critical, as is their requirement of meeting GDPR standards. Social Schools required enhanced data security, achieved through Divio's cloud computing in education with private S3 buckets. All of their data continues to be protected by Divio’s robust web application security measures.

Results

Social Schools have been demonstrably satisfied with their Divio solution. What once was a slow application that was struggling to meet user needs now delivers exceptional user experience, with the in-built functionality to grow with the SaaS company as new users are acquired. Working in collaboration, the new application means that Social Schools are able to keep up with demand whilst keeping overheads low.