AWS Migration and Modernization plus a DevOps culture for Earwig Academic

Overview

Earwig Academic is an education technology (EdTech) company who provide software to schools. Their product allows teachers to upload and tag evidence of their pupils’ learning and progress, and simplifies schools’ reporting and evidence requirements. They have a particular focus on special educational needs (SEN) education.

Before the migration to AWS, we couldn’t have handled an
expansion like this.
Mark Hindmarsh, Director, Earwig Academic

Opportunity / Customer Challenge

Lambert Labs took over management of Earwig’s Python / Django application, which was running on a third-party hosting provider. We were able to improve performance and stability, as well as building a staging environment in AWS, and a CI/CD pipeline to improve deployment time and code quality.

As the number of schools using Earwig’s product increased, the infrastructure provided by the third-party hosting provider could not handle the traffic and users soon encountered frequent performance issues.

Solution

Lambert Labs performed a swift migration of Earwig’s solution to AWS, rebuilding their architecture on a range of AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and Amazon ElastiCache Service for Redis. To help with the migration to AWS, Lambert Labs recommended Earwig apply to AWS Activate, which helps qualifying companies get started on AWS by providing support, resources, and credits. The program helped Earwig Academic make a quick migration while minimizing the financial burden.

We’ve seen a 20 percent improvement in application page load times since the migration and have experienced no downtime. We’ve also adopted a DevOps culture, with deployments multiple times per day compared to the previous rate of a single weekly deployment. Before the migration to AWS, we couldn’t have handled an expansion like this. Now, with Lambert Labs, we have someone we can trust to advise us and manage our infrastructure while we focus on helping educators. (Mark Hindmarsh, Director, Earwig Academic)

Outcome

The migration to AWS was a huge success. Since the migration, application downtime from overtaxed infrastructure has been reduced and the creation of a DevOps culture has enabled Earwig Academic to release application updates and database migrations more frequently and reliably.

Lambert Labs continue to work with Earwig on an ongoing basis: further modernizing their architecture, reducing cost through scaling strategies and decoupling elements of their application to create a more loosely coupled architecture.

Earwig’s ongoing migration to AWS has been really rewarding for us, as it’s given us loads of opportunities to make great use of modern architectural best practices. This has enabled us to achieve tangible improvements around cost, resilience and performance efficiency that the team at Earwig really appreciate. (George Lambert, Founder & CEO, Lambert Labs)

About Earwig

Earwig Academic is an education technology (EdTech) company who provide software to schools. Their product allows teachers to upload and tag evidence of their pupils’ learning and progress, and simplifies schools’ reporting and evidence requirements. They have a particular focus on special educational needs (SEN) education.