DevOps Consulting for EdTech
EdTech traffic is scheduled adversity: the whole cohort logs in when the exam opens, the whole district syncs when first period starts, and the platform idles all summer. An outage during an assessment window is not a degraded experience — it is students unable to sit an exam, institutions on the phone and trust that takes semesters to rebuild. Underneath it all you hold data about students, often minors, that FERPA, GDPR and every procurement review treat accordingly. Both problems are infrastructure problems.
Exam windows compress a month of traffic into an hour
Thousands of students start, autosave and submit within the same few minutes. If the platform buckles, exams get voided, institutions escalate, and the failure is remembered through years of renewal conversations.
How we fix it — Load tests that replicate an actual exam — synchronized logins, steady autosave writes, a submission stampede at the deadline — plus pre-scaling for the exam calendar you already know, database connection pooling and write-path queueing tuned for the burst. Proven before exam day, not on it.
The LMS wobbles exactly when term starts
Enrollment week and the first day of term multiply load overnight after a quiet summer — and a bad first week shapes how every teacher and student judges the platform for the rest of the year.
How we fix it — Autoscaling tuned to the academic calendar with pre-scaling for known crunch weeks, SLO-based monitoring on the flows that matter — login, content load, submission — and runbooks for the on-call engineer when a district onboards at 8 a.m. on a Monday.
Student data is scattered further than anyone can enumerate
Records of minors end up in application logs, analytics events, prod snapshots used for staging and developer laptops — each copy is a FERPA or GDPR liability and a breach-notification letter waiting to happen.
How we fix it — We trace where student data actually flows and close it down: redaction at the logging source, encryption at rest and in transit, least-privilege access with audit trails, and non-production environments fed by synthetic or de-identified data — never a copy of prod.
District and university procurement stalls on security reviews
The pilot goes well, then the institution’s security questionnaire arrives — data residency, encryption, access control, retention — and the deal waits a term because the answers are paragraphs instead of facts.
How we fix it — The controls procurement asks about, implemented as code: RBAC and audit logging, encryption everywhere, tested backups with written recovery times, documented data flows. Questionnaires get answered with links to evidence, and sales cycles stop losing semesters.
Exam-day reliability and student-data privacy, engineered in.
EdTech buys under two frames at once: will it hold on the day that matters, and can we trust you with records about minors. We build the platform so both answers are demonstrable — load-test results on one side, enforced controls on the other.
- Assessment-day readinessLoad tested against real exam shapes each season, with pre-scaling for the published calendar and a rehearsed incident plan.
- FERPA/GDPR-aligned handlingEncryption, least-privilege access, log redaction and de-identified non-prod data — student records stay where they belong.
- Audit trails for accessWho touched which student’s records, when — captured and retained to the standard institutional reviews expect.
- Academic records that surviveEncrypted, versioned backups with rehearsed restores — grades and submissions are unrecoverable data, treated that way.
Two free tools, no signup: estimate your cloud waste with the cost calculator, or score your production posture on the security scorecard. Fixed-scope packages and prices are on the pricing page.
Frequently asked
Can you make sure we survive exam season?
Yes — ideally starting a few weeks before the window. We load-test with the real shape of an assessment (synchronized starts, constant autosaves, a deadline stampede), fix the bottlenecks — typically database connections, session storage and undersized autoscaling — and set pre-scaling for the exam calendar. You go in with a tested number, not a hope.
Does FERPA actually impose infrastructure requirements?
FERPA does not prescribe technology, but it makes you accountable for protecting education records — and institutions translate that into concrete asks: encryption, access control, audit logs, breach procedures. GDPR adds explicit requirements wherever you touch EU students. We implement the controls so your answers to both are enforced by the platform, not asserted in a policy PDF.
Traffic drops to almost nothing outside term. Can the bill follow it?
It should — academic seasonality is the most predictable in software. Autoscaling that follows load down, scheduled scaling for nights and weekends, and non-production environments that sleep outside working hours typically cut a meaningful share of baseline spend without touching peak capacity.
We self-host Moodle / run a custom LMS. Do you work with that?
Yes. Whether it is Moodle, Open edX or a fully custom platform, the infrastructure layer is the same work: containerised deploys, autoscaling, database operations, observability and backup discipline. We harden what you already run rather than pushing a migration you do not need.
Be the platform that held up on exam day.
A free audit of your infrastructure — exam readiness, student-data handling against FERPA and GDPR expectations, and seasonal cost — delivered as a prioritized report, no obligation attached.
NO SIGNUP · NO OBLIGATION · REPORT IS YOURS TO KEEP