Smrt English ramps up site growth via improved performance and scalability

The obstacles they faced

Smrt English had been hosting the site on Amazon EC2 for some time, but the deployment was not providing the high availability the organization needed. After a few unexpected outages caused the website to go down, and in light of the inherent risk of losing data due to the limited deployment architecture, Smrt English decided to invest in implementing a fault-tolerant deployment that would be architected to handle increased performance requirements to support the ongoing growth in popularity.

What we achieved together

Having insights from monitoring tools helped to fine-tune the system and reduce the cost of the infrastructure while providing much-improved performance over the original deployment. Rackspace Technology also implemented a fully automated build system that connects the Smrt English SVN repository and AWS Elastic Beanstalk and allows the company to frequently release new versions of the code without requiring direct support. This has proven to be beneficial as Smrt English has successfully made many code pushes to production, allowing it to run an agile process and constantly improve the service they provide to the students.

Rackspace Technology immediately recognized the potential in delivering a robust and scalable solution that would both address the concerns around resiliency, and provide future-proofing for handling load increases by implementing auto-scaling on the application tier. Rackspace Technology also deployed several monitoring tools to gain better visibility into the performance of the environment and the application to help ensure the smooth operations that Smrt English required.