When you’re making a product for a potentially large audience, there’s a lot to consider. Scalability, security, disaster management, third party API integrations, single sign-on, general app performance… it’s a long list. Add to that concerns that recur across implementations in the field of educational technology: COPPA, HIPPA, 508…. the list gets longer still. Technology is not unlike the field of medicine in that every skill is its own specialty, and no single developer can possibly possess expertise in each of them. This becomes exponentially more true as the product begins to scale, and the implementation requirements more complex. We work closely with experts in the field and experts employed by our clients to make sure that our technologies meet the requirements of the task at hand in a manner that guarantees a solid user experience and that is in conformance with client policies and protocols.
In recent years, tools for creating a solid, scalable and secure server infrastructure have become much more powerful and usable. Frankly, in ed tech, it’s unlikely to find products that require dedicated server farms that rival those of Amazon and company. Most ed tech products target comparatively small audiences at scales that can be accommodated with basic implementations of these scalability tools. We’re big fans of the AWS cloud services, and routinely set up accounts for clients building new products as part of SBIR research grants or larger scale distributions. They offer an exhaustive array of features that allow us to create encrypted standalone databases that offer geographic failover and regular backups. Above, we’ve leveraged the elastic beanstalk service to monitor traffic on a piece of reporting software for a teacher retention app such that traffic spikes will spawn new server instances to keep the system running smoothly. We use the certificate manager for free SSL certificates, the email services for spam-free automated emails, the ECS service for spawning Docker containers and other small tasks… we could go on and on… and indeed we do. We also work with more limited providers such as Digital Ocean and Media temple…. but AWS is our fave by a long shot.
This one’s a bit of a walk down memory lane. The first startup that I cofounded (which ultimately didn’t start up) was in conversation with a potentially major league client, one that would be a huge feather in our collective cap. They wanted to use our app, but internally, on premises, fully integrated with their LDAP user registry and SAML single sign on service. Interestingly, they also wanted a Debian package repository to source the app from on their linux boxes. So I figured out how to do it all, and you can see some of that above. I suppose the point here is that every project and client is unique and if you’ve been down enough roads in this world, you can both find your way down the next one and still manage to enjoy the subtle or, in this case, not so subtle ways that it differs from those that came before.