Building a Scalable SaaS Infrastructure for Meitner

In Brief:

• Meitner, an avant-garde digital school platform, needed a solid, scalable cloud infrastructure to support their educational applications.
• They faced critical challenges regarding cloud management, security, and scalability with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
• To overcome these hurdles and transform their vision into reality, Meitner partnered with Redeploy, and our leading AWS specialists.

The Challenge: AWS Integration and Infrastructure Scalability

Meitner was rapidly advancing and consistently integrating new features and rectifying bugs. However, despite their technical prowess, the team needed more expertise in building a scalable AWS Landing Zone and robust governance infrastructure for their SaaS solution. In addition, there were many critical issues present. For example, inadequate access control, non-implementation of security best practices, and limited visibility into the infrastructure's state left the developers and technical managers in the dark.

“As a fast-growing startup, it's essential for everyone to focus on the right tasks and what they are good at. Thereby it's vital to bring in external resources to help out where your team is weaker and to save time. Redeploy has been a great partner in assisting us in speeding up the platform while reducing costs. So my team can focus on what they are great at - building the best school platform on the market.”

– Adrian Andersson, CEO of Meitner

The deployment of their applications to Kubernetes further compounded these challenges. Despite performing rolling upgrades, the service recurrently encountered outages. This consistent disruption forced the team into a restrictive release schedule, confining deployments to evenings and rendering daytime patching of underlying nodes virtually impossible.

Consequently, Meitner's needed to enhance cost efficiency and streamline the infrastructure.

The Solution: Streamlining AWS Infrastructure and Enhancing Security

Using services like AWS ControlTower, our Redeploy Build team leaned on established, trusted, and proven best practices to create an AWS Landing Zone for Meitner. In addition, it was integrated with Meitner's existing identity provider to enable secure access to the infrastructure.

“Working with the team at Meitner has been fantastic - they're full of passion and talent! Given that we've been dealing with data from students and teachers, the stakes were high. We needed to protect sensitive data while also delivering a platform that's user-friendly and modern - no one's got time for rigid and outdated tech, especially not the new generation. By utilizing the best AWS has to offer, we could create the perfect match of an affordable, scalable, and easy-managed infrastructure meanwhile ensuring and safe-store the end-user data.”

– Lars Hasselrot, Redeploy Build

By combining services like EKS, GuardDuty, and SecurityHub with third-party observability tools, Meitner now has complete insight into the security of their infrastructure and the overall state of their application. Knowledge is power, and that power gives you peace of mind.

Our Build team also optimized Kubernetes integration in EKS with other AWS Services, such as Load Balancer, to avoid outages during rolling upgrades.

Results: Unleashing Innovation and 5x Increased Deployment Rate

By streamlining cloud governance, our AWS Specialists unlocked opportunities for Meitner's development team to reallocate their energy towards their true strength: innovating their unique digital school platform. The newly scalable environment lifted the weight of cloud management and dissolved concerns about scalability or outages.

Previously, their deployment schedule was strictly bound to post-office hours, which restrained them to updates once a week or, in some instances, biweekly. However, the newfound flexibility and confidence in their robust system empowered them to deploy updates during office hours, a marked shift in their approach that allowed them to update almost daily and speed up their deployment pace by 5x.