Developing a Secure, Multi-Tenant SaaS Platform for Modern Learning

Delivering a scalable, cost-effective, and secure global platform with seamless AWS integration and multi-tenant architecture.

About
The Client

The client offers a subscription-based research platform designed to cater specific needs of K-12 students, educators, and researchers. This platform delivers an extensive research experience, featuring advanced tools for research, citation management, feedback, and collaboration. The interface supports genuine research practices and facilitates smooth collaboration among users. Key features include real-time collaboration, resource sharing, and the ability for educators to provide feedback on student projects.

The
Challenge

Building a Global EdTech Platform

The customer aimed to design and build a global EdTech platform that could be used by institutions and their users. The customer wanted the platform to follow a pay-as-you-go model and support a multi-tenant architecture.

Converting an Idea into a Real SaaS Product

The platform needed to help students, educators, and researchers organize their ideas and collaborate on articulating arguments effectively.

Building for Security and Scalability

Student privacy and intellectual property had to be protected throughout the entire process.

What Forgeahead Did

Applied BaaS approach to build a SaaS solution that provides a web-based, centrally hosted, and subscription-based software experience.

The platform incorporates SaaS features such as automatic updates, scalability using AWS Auto Scaling, and logical data isolation for multi-tenancy.

SaaS enabled efficient service delivery, cost-effectiveness, high availability, and seamless collaboration among users.

The platform’s multi-tenant architecture ensures data privacy and security.

Role of AWS in Building
the SaaS Application

Migration of platform
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

Users to the platform 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.

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 minute, or contract to save costs.

High availability and 24x7 accessibility across the globe.