Modernizing DevOps Infrastructure for a Leading UK Tech Education Provider

Challenges

The client scaled its bootcamp offerings and onboarded more students and corporate clients. And soon the limitations of their existing infrastructure began to surface.

The manual nature of their deployment process was the primary issue, which often led to inconsistencies across environments and frequent system downtime. Such a lack of automation made it challenging to maintain stability, especially during high-traffic periods like new cohort launches.

The absence of version-controlled infrastructure provisioning was another pressing challenge. The team had trouble with configuration drift because they did not use Infrastructure as Code (IaC). This made it hard to replicate environments or troubleshoot problems accurately.

Onboarding new students was time-consuming because we had to create each student’s learning environment manually. This process delayed their ability to start hands-on projects.

Furthermore, the platform struggled with proper monitoring. It was hard to track the performance and health of student project clusters and backend services, which slowed down incident response times. When demand spiked during peak seasons, the system faced issues with scalability, affecting the learning experience and putting pressure on internal teams to quickly address infrastructure problems.

Solutions

To address these challenges, we assembled a specialized DevOps team with cross-functional expertise in cloud architecture, CI/CD, Kubernetes, and security. The first step was automating the deployment pipelines using Jenkins and GitHub Actions. This brought consistency and speed to application releases while reducing human error. We then implemented Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, allowing the team to define and manage cloud resources through reusable modules. This not only resolved the issue of configuration drift but also enabled version-controlled provisioning.

To streamline student onboarding and improve scalability, our Kubernetes specialists provisioned Amazon EKS clusters and used Helm to create isolated namespaces for each student group. This allowed the platform to scale horizontally while maintaining performance and security. We also introduced a centralized monitoring setup using Prometheus and Grafana, providing real-time visibility across all microservices and classroom environments. In parallel, our site reliability engineers set up autoscaling policies and configured alerting systems to detect and respond to incidents proactively.

Security improvements were made by integrating AWS IAM for fine-grained access control and managing secrets through HashiCorp Vault. These enhancements helped the client’s platform transition to a robust, cloud-native platform that could confidently support both individual learners and enterprise clients, even during peak periods of activity.