Renaissance Learning has migrated its DnA platform from Google Cloud (GCP) to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
A provider of pre-K-12 education technology, the DnA platform is a standards-based assessment creation and administration solution used for more than 16 million students and in more than one-third of US schools and more than 100 other countries.
The company claims to have reduced its cloud spend by 30 percent by migrating to AWS while seeing performance, scalability and security improvements.
In a case study released this month, Renaissance Learning reportedly used AWS DataSync to migrate 12 terabytes and more than 42 million files and objects from GCP to AWS.
During this process, the company used Amazon Elastic File System and Terraform to modernize several items, while others needed to have their application framework upgraded and code refactored.
The full migration journey spanned seven months, and was completed in October 2023.
In July, the DnA team conducted a three-day migration 'experience-based acceleration' to migrate a non-productive application into an AWS environment as a trial. By the end of the third day, the DnA team had migrated the main application, along with 30 databases, from GCP to AWS.
"We probably knocked out about two-to-three weeks’ worth of work over the three days. It has drastically improved and accelerated our ability to make quick decisions,” said Sebastian Gunn-Hamner, director of software at Renaissance Learning.
In addition to cost savings, Renaissance Learning cites the savings in 'cognitive load' on engineers having to be experts on multiple clouds.
While citing the cost savings of using AWS, the financial impact of actually migrating from one cloud provider to another is not mentioned. The migration efforts were conducted prior to the major cloud providers removing data egress charges with Google making the move in January and AWS and Microsoft following suit in March.
