Customer Overview
WeMakeScholars is an online educational platform that connects students with funding, scholarships, and other learning opportunities. As the user base grew, their legacy IT systems struggled with performance, reliability, and security. They required a secure, scalable, and modern cloud environment to reduce downtime, accelerate deployments, and deliver a seamless experience to students and staff worldwide.
Business Challenge
Before adopting a modern AWS-based solution, WeMakeScholars faced several operational challenges that hindered growth and innovation.
Key Challenges
- Database Performance Issues: The RDS instance was running MySQL 5, which was outdated, slow, and unable to scale effectively during peak demand.
- Publicly Exposed Servers: Application servers were directly accessible from the internet, creating security risks and compliance concerns.
- Manual & Inefficient Deployments: Deployments were manual, occurring only 2–3 times a month, each taking several hours and multiple engineers.
- Poor Monitoring & Visibility: Lack of proper monitoring and alerting tools delayed issue detection and response.
WeMakeScholars needed a secure, automated, and scalable AWS-native environment that could handle growing demand while minimizing risks.
AWS-Powered Solution by i2k2 Networks
i2k2 Networks designed and implemented a production-grade AWS infrastructure following the AWS Well-Architected Framework, ensuring scalability, automation, and security.
Solution Highlights
Database Modernization & Performance
- Migrated from MySQL 5 RDS to Amazon Aurora MySQL 8 Serverless v2, enabling faster queries, seamless scaling, and built-in fault tolerance.
- Introduced Redis caching on EC2 to reduce database load and deliver faster response times.
Compute, Networking & Scalability
- Migrated workloads into private VPC subnets, ensuring no direct public exposure.
- Integrated Application Load Balancer (ALB) to handle incoming traffic securely and efficiently.
- Applied fine-grained security groups to restrict access and protect sensitive workloads.
CI/CD Automation & Deployment Velocity
- Implemented Bitbucket Pipelines to automate builds and deployments.
- Reduced deployment times from 3–4 hours to under 20 minutes, with multiple deployments per week.
Security and Monitoring
- Deployed AWS WAF for protection against common web threats.
- Enabled Amazon GuardDuty, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and VPC Flow Logs for continuous monitoring, intrusion detection, and compliance auditing.
Outcomes & Business Impact
- Improved Uptime: Achieved 95% application uptime, even during high traffic periods.
- Increased Deployment Frequency: Moved from a few monthly releases to multiple weekly deployments, accelerating innovation.
- Enhanced Security: Eliminated public server exposure, with AWS WAF and GuardDuty continuously mitigating threats.
- Boosted Productivity: Freed engineering teams from manual deployments, allowing focus on feature development and user experience.
Solution Architecture
Conclusion
By leveraging AWS-native services, i2k2 Networks successfully modernized WeMakeScholars’ infrastructure. The solution delivered stronger security, faster performance, and high availability, enabling the company to scale globally with confidence.
With Aurora MySQL 8 Serverless v2, Redis caching, CI/CD automation, and advanced monitoring, WeMakeScholars now operates on a secure, reliable, and future-ready platform, empowering them to better serve students worldwide.
About i2k2 Networks
Your Trusted Technology Partner:
Established in April 1999, with just a few clients and 4 employees, i2k2 Networks has now grown into a leading data center and web hosting company with more than 4000 clients across the globe. At i2k2, we work on a philosophy of commitment toward our customers and take total ownership to keep the customer’s application online and make data secure. We get motivated by our client’s success and help them to scale their business with cutting-edge technologies and requisite expertise.
Why i2k2?
Our strategy
Cloud Computing – We are highly proficient in cloud hosting serving more than 4000 Corporates with 14000+ VMs and Physical servers mainly in India.
Cloud Consulting – We are adept at delivering solutions on public cloud, private cloud, and Hybrid cloud. We are partners with AWS, Azure, Google, and other cloud providers.
Our mission
Focus to service our customers and create products that are extremely user-centric and solution-oriented with a highly-skilled technical team and a vast experience in the technology space, we have been developing products that are solving real-life issues that can service the masses
Our vision
We offer tailor-made solutions and services so that businesses can leverage the maximum benefits through us. We ensure that the delivery and quality parameters are met and remain committed to the best possible customer experience