Securing and Scaling for Education Scotland: Strengthening Digital Learning with Glow

Background

Education Scotland is the national body for supporting quality and improvement in education across Scotland. Working with learners, educators, and educational establishments, Education Scotland enhances learning experiences and ensures the highest of standards of teaching and learning. 

The Challenge    

What were we working with? What is Glow?                                       

Glow is a digital environment for learning and teaching, designed to give learners and educators access to social and collaborative services in a safe online space, accessible anytime, anywhere and on any device.

At its core, Glow comprises a number of different web services, made available to its users via a central authentication and portal service (GAPS) currently provided by RM Education Ltd. A key component of Glow is the Glow Blogs solution, one of the four key Glow Services provided by Education Scotland.

When Affinity stepped in, we took on the full support for the Glow environments and applications from a previous supplier. This of course was no small task! Glow Blogs consisted of 33 WordPress multi-sites, most with a large number of blogs within them, totalling around 150,000+ sites. These sites run on a sophisticated and complex AWS infrastructure, that we manage in partnership with Databarracks. There are three test/stage environments (integrate, explore and stage) to ensure that all releases and hotfixes are fully tested before live deployment.                                                

Our challenge here was to design a fit-for-purpose hosting architecture  that could not only handle the scale of Glow Blogs but also ensure a smooth transition from the previous supplier. Ensuring a continued high-quality level of service that both educators and students rely on, without disruption, was absolutely essential.         

The Solution

When we started our partnership with Education Scotland, we made sure to go through a thorough onboarding process with them and their previous supplier. 

So, what did this involve? First off was architecting an enterprise AWS infrastructure to take advantage of their latest innovations and produce a solution with no single point of failure. We added features like auto scaling and scheduled scaling across the suite of test and live environments to reduce the monthly costs. When it came to the WordPress plugins we introduced, we didn’t just simply use what was already there. No, we made  significant improvements to cater for the scale of the service and to deal with data access rights and asset management.   

We set up a Jira Service Desk for Education Scotland, giving them an easy way to raise and track any issues. This included the capturing of Education Scotland’s SLAs within the Service Desk to allow the tracking of all requests against them.

We reviewed and took on more than 40 Bitbucket repositories of documentation and code. We also went through a full build and deployment to the test environments of a monthly release, to highlight any issues around credentials etc.

Change management is key so we made sure we understood Education Scotland's processes so that we could integrate seamlessly.    

By working closely with the infrastructure support team to ensure we fully understood the architecture as it relates to the application, making sure we all had relevant access.

Since taking on support, we’ve been smoothly delivering  hotfixes and monthly releases to the live environment. Every update goes through our rigorous QA and testing process, including load and pen testing - to ensure everything is shipshape. After this, Education Scotland always runs their own regression testing before we get to the exciting part: the go live!