TNTP Application Migration to the AWS Cloud

TNTP’s mission is to end the injustice of educational inequality by providing excellent teachers to the students who need them most and by advancing policies and practices that ensure effective teaching in every classroom.

Challenge

In the wake of a flooding, TNTP looked to Effectual to quickly and effectively move their public-facing web applications and internal applications to the AWS cloud for better cost, scalability, disaster recovery capabilities, and better application performance.

Solution

Effectual worked with TNTP to define a migration strategy, set up the infrastructure in accordance with best practices and to take advantage of the full feature set of cloud, and provided scripts to automate future updates and deployments. Effectual introduced TNTP to the Infrastructure as Code model so that they could version control the state of their infrastructure through the use of AWS CloudFormation templates and take advantage of AWS’ built-in resource dependency definitions to perform rolling updates with minimal downtime or system impact.

The Benefits

Cost Efficiency

TNTP experienced lower costs for running their workloads in the cloud compared to on-premise IT hardware and maintenance costs. Effectual assisted TNTP to utilize cloud purchasing options and offerings to meet TNTP’s technical requirements while remaining cost-efficient.

Scalability

The use of the AWS cloud provided capabilities for flexible infrastructure to allow accommodation of various sizes of workloads. The infrastructure used AWS Auto Scaling capabilities along with custom settings in AWS CloudWatch to automatically scale to accommodate larger workloads while retaining transparency of the scaling activities to the end user.

Disaster Recovery

Failover capabilities and strategies such as the use of AWS Elastic Load Balancing within AWS were implemented to protect the system, maximize uptime, and minimizes data loss in the event of a disaster. Notifications, alarms, and safeguards were put in place to ensure immediate notification of any abnormal behavior.