How Divio Transformed Social Schools’ SaaS Application Architecture

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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, effort and providing a better service for their end users.

Social School’s 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.

The new Social School 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!).

Social School’s 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 needed a solution that had private S3 buckets, which Divio was able to build into the product. All of their data continues to be protected by Divio’s robust security measures.