BrightChamps Achieves 30% Lower AWS Spend and 3x More Scalable Applications with Automated Cloud Modernization
About the Customer
BrightChamps is a global edtech platform dedicated to nurturing next-generation skills in children through interactive, technology-driven learning experiences. By offering courses in coding, artificial intelligence, robotics, and financial literacy, BrightChamps empowers young learners to develop practical, future-ready skills. The platform combines expert-led instruction with engaging digital content, enabling students across multiple countries to learn at their own pace and excel beyond traditional classroom boundaries.
Customer Challenge
BrightChamps faced key challenges in building a secure, scalable, and reliable cloud infrastructure to support its expanding user base and deliver a high-quality learning experience.
The leadership team struggled to establish modern cloud infrastructure and data security using the latest technologies and best practices, which led to increasing technical debt and slowed business growth.
- Limited scalability, availability, and reliability along with the absence of strong cloud governance and compliance, impacted both production and staging environments.
- Security and performance concerns persisted, including vulnerability to DDoS attacks, inconsistent access controls, and difficulty in adopting new features to enhance scalability and stability.
- Manual monitoring and lack of proactive alerting delayed issue detection and resolution, resulting in increased downtime and operational overhead.
- Suboptimal database and cache performance, including resource contention in MongoDB on EKS and overhead from self-managed Redis clusters, created scalability bottlenecks and frequent service disruptions.
- The absence of real-time analytics and unified reporting restricted data-driven decision-making for stakeholders.
- Inconsistent resource utilization and lack of automated scaling limited reliability and uptime in critical environments.
Left unaddressed, these challenges would have continued to drive up costs, limit operational efficiency, increase security risks, and prevent BrightChamps from providing a seamless and scalable digital learning experience to its global community.
Solution
Infra360 engineered a cloud modernization strategy for BrightChamps, integrating advanced automation, robust security controls, and real-time observability. The solution streamlined complex operations, eliminated performance bottlenecks, and established a future-ready foundation for data-driven growth. Key solution steps included:
- Upgraded Kubernetes and EKS clusters for advanced security and compatibility.
- Integrated Prometheus and Grafana for comprehensive monitoring and proactive alerting.
- Migrated MongoDB to a dedicated VM and shifted Redis to AWS ElastiCache, both for improved database performance and reliability.
- Added Percona for ongoing database health monitoring and proactive optimization.
- Enabled self-service analytics and real-time reporting with Metabase.
- Deployed a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to defend against DDoS attacks and maintain application availability.
- Enhanced scaling and availability in staging through HPA, PDB, affinity rules, and Cluster Autoscaler.
- Secured data further by deploying MySQL and Redis in private subnet VMs and moving Production RDS to a private subnet.
- Used Terraformer for backup infrastructure management across environments.
- Upgraded the monitoring stack from New Relic to APM/OTEL and automated monitoring and logging deployments with ArgoCD.
With automated deployment pipelines, granular monitoring, and advanced security measures now embedded throughout their cloud environment, BrightChamps delivers new features at speed while maintaining data integrity and service continuity. These improvements have enabled the platform to adapt to user demand in real time, minimize operational risk, and support rapid business expansion.
Results & Benefits
30% AWS cost reduction
100% automated, versioned infrastructure backups
faster deployment cycles
public database exposure
- Zero public exposure for RDS, now fully contained in a private subnet
- Modern cluster versions deployed, supporting advanced workloads and delivering greater stability.
- Redis availability improved with fully managed, auto-scaling infrastructure
- Database management overhead is reduced with optimized resource allocation and proactive health monitoring.
- Analytics and reporting are now fully self-service, empowering rapid, data-driven decisions.
- Continuous, automated infrastructure backups ensure version control and recovery.
- DDoS protection strengthened, maintaining uninterrupted application access
- Staging environment uptime and scalability increased through dynamic, automated configurations.
- Observability advanced with standardized telemetry and automated alerting.
- Monitoring stack now deployed automatically with version control for consistency.
- Cluster always current with the latest features and security patches
- 24/7 real-time system monitoring enabled, minimizing downtime and enabling instant issue detection
Best Practices Implemented
- Vision Alignment: Collaborated with leadership to understand business and technical objectives.
- Expert Onboarding: Assigned a dedicated cloud engineering team from project start.
- Cost Optimization and Cloud-Native Design: Prioritized early cost savings before building a new Kubernetes-based infrastructure.
- Phased Cluster Upgrades: Upgraded EKS clusters with staging validation before production rollout.
- Metrics and Observability: Deployed Prometheus and Grafana with tailored alerting for real-time insights.
- Database Modernization: Migrated MongoDB to a dedicated VM and Redis to AWS ElastiCache with comprehensive testing and application reconfiguration.
- Proactive Database Monitoring: Integrated Percona for continuous health checks and performance optimization.
- Self-Service Analytics: Enabled stakeholders with Metabase dashboards and real-time reporting.
- Application Security: Implemented a Web Application Firewall to prevent DDoS and cyber threats.
- Automated Scaling and Availability: Configured HPA, PDB, affinity rules, and Cluster Autoscaler for dynamic scaling in staging.
- Network and Data Security: Applied security groups, network rules, and isolated subnets for databases.
- Infrastructure as Code: Managed infrastructure with Terraform, maintained in version control.
- Network Optimization: Updated subnet groups and route tables with thorough connectivity testing.
- Observability Enhancements: Installed OTEL agents, updated instrumentation, and set alerting rules.
- GitOps Deployment: Defined pipelines and connected ArgoCD to observability repositories for automation.
- AWS Compliance and Phased Rollout: Followed AWS best practices, validated add-ons, and executed staged deployments.
