Noodle Tools
Built an edtech SaaS platform for K-12 students
NoodleTools wished to build a SaaS platform where K-12 students, educators, and researchers could conduct authentic research and collaborate to write original content.
Customer came with an idea to design and build a global EdTech platform which can be used by many institutions and their users. Customer wanted the platform to be a pay-as-you-go model supporting a multi-tenant architecture.
Building a Global EdTech platform
The platform would need to help students, educators, and researchers organize their ideas and articulate arguments collaboratively.
Convert an idea into a real SaaS Product
Build for security and
scalability
- 1.Applied BaaS approach to built a SaaS solution that provides a web-based, centrally hosted, and subscription-based software experience.
- 2. The platform incorporates SaaS features such as automatic updates, scalability using AWS Auto Scaling, and logical data isolation for multi-tenancy.
- 3.SaaS enabled efficient service delivery, cost-effectiveness, high availability, and seamless collaboration among users.
- 4. Platform’s multi-tenant architecture ensures data privacy and security.
Multitenant architecture where all users and applications share a common, centrally maintained infrastructure and code base.
Elastic infra that can expand to handle a base of ~10M users and withstand ~60,000 requests per min, or contract to save costs.
High availability and 24x7 accessibility across the globe.
As part of the hybrid design, initially, Amazon EC2 compute was used to host the application behind Application Load Balancers (ALB) service. Hooked Amazon WAF to protect the application and secure business interests. A large number of users trigger tens of thousands of CRUD operations for which relational Amazon RDS cluster service was employed along with AWS DynamoDB table to fetch horizontal data that improved overall response time and reliability of the operations. Additional Optimizations – Part of the AppModernization where Forgeahead has earned AWS Blackbelt, those skills are employed to deploy microservices using AWS APIGateway along with Amazon ECS Fargate containers. AWS OpenSearch service helped reduce the complexity and easily integrate features to improve the cloud application.
Forgeahead migrated NoodleTools to AWS
Being a largely monolithic application at that point, we leveraged AWS EC2 instances behind ELB and immediately benefited from AWS’s managed physical infrastructure and quick scalability.
Search and Indexing
NoodleTools users need to be able to quickly search and reference their content for research. We used AWS OpenSearch, SQS and AWS Lambda to capture and index user content and allow the users to search them using keywords.
Containerization and Microservices
Progressively decoupled modules and split them into separate services. Later, we migrated 80% of our services to Amazon ECS as separate ECS tasks. With the microservice based architecture and our CI/CD pipelines, we were able to seamlessly deploy our code changes to any one of our ECS tasks with no downtime in most scenarios.
AWS EC2
AWS DynamoDB
API Gateway
AWS Fargate
Amazon Aurora
CloudFront
AWS WAF
Route53
ElasticCache
Amazon S3
Amazon SQS
Technology Stack
BACKBONE JS
AWS
BOOTSTRAP
PYTHON
Damon Abilock
Platform is highly accepted, used by over 1 million active students worldwide
Easy tenant onboarding.
Response time of less than 200ms for 99% of requests
Improved performance with optimized use of AWS services such as Elasticache, OpenSearch, and CloudFront.