Kidaptive’s mission is to empower teachers, parents, and learners of all ages by creating a vibrant ecosystem of personalized learning experiences.
Kidaptive’s Adaptive Learning Platform (ALP) is an AI-based SaaS solution for educational applications to increase learner engagement and improve outcomes. When they signed a new enterprise customer, Kidaptive was faced with a new set of operational requirements. Kidaptive engaged BitPusher to make the platform more secure, resilient, cost efficient, and to provide 24/7 incident response and operational support.
The Adaptive Learning Platform Built on AWS
The Adaptive Learning Platform is a powerful and flexible assessment and reporting platform designed to capture data from a variety of sources. These data are incorporated into a universal framework and analyzed to create a personalized learner profile for each user. The ALP allows for customized interactions based on well-researched pedagogical principles.
The ALP is delivered as a SaaS offering that adds functionality to other companies’ educational applications, turning a generic learning process into a highly customized one, while providing deep insights into each learner’s progress. It consists primarily of a Java application written by Kidaptive and a data pipeline based on the Hadoop ecosystem.
Kidaptive built the ALP on AWS because it allowed them to develop and launch quickly. A combination of AWS-managed solutions and AWS-ready solutions from other providers allowed Kidaptive to deploy the full ALP application and data pipeline with their focus on application development rather than infrastructure.
The sophistication of the ALP model meant that the infrastructure was complex relative to its size. When Kidaptive signed a contract with a large educational publisher to deliver the ALP in schools, they realized they did not have sufficient confidence in their infrastructure and processes to deliver on the service level required. To meet the requirements of their new enterprise client, they needed to reduce risk and increase their capacity to address operational problems.
The main application included a Kidaptive-developed Java application running on EC2 using an Application Load Balancer, event handling using Apache Kafka, and AI processing based on HBase, Spark, and Oozie.
Kidaptive turned to BitPusher for their ability to manage this complexity and their expertise in AWS, data pipelines, and general administration of high-quality SaaS platforms. The initial phase consisted of a detailed review of the application, potential vulnerabilities, and AWS opportunities. Security risks and potential causes of downtime were detailed along with a comprehensive discussion of mitigation strategies.
During the second phase, BitPusher expanded monitoring for the ALP to make it comprehensive and effective. Monitoring was added for additional components, metrics reorganized, and alarm thresholds tuned. Better redundancy and other improvements were made to the SaaS infrastructure so it could self-heal after most kinds of failure.
The third phase of the engagement was to manage the ALP platform on an ongoing basis. This included covering alarms and incidents 24/7, working with the Kidaptive development team to meet the evolving needs of the application, and a program of continual improvement based on the analysis of incidents and of the monitored operational metrics.
After BitPusher was brought on board, availability for the ALP service improved and the AWS costs decreased in ratio to the demand. The combination of strategic advice, hands-on improvements, and 24/7 monitoring and response allowed Kidaptive to meet the requirements of their new enterprise client and ensured the platform would be highly performant and deliver high-quality service.
About BitPusher
BitPusher is a DevOps company offering project work and ongoing management at a higher quality and lower, more predictable cost than consultants or in-house teams. Over the past 20 years Bitpusher has developed a delivery model based on reusable engineering components and a collaborative approach which allows for the right combination of availability, scalability, security, performance, and a cost-efficient use of hosting resources.
BitPusher is an advanced tier AWS consulting partner, an AWS public sector partner, and part of the AWS solution provider program.
