Support and Optimization of the Azure-Based Infrastructure of Educational Apps

Customer

The Customer is an EU-based non-commercial organization that helps children develop cognitive abilities via specialized training apps. Besides the main educational purpose, the applications collect and submit learning data to the statistics authorities.

Challenge

The underlying IT infrastructure of the Customer’s apps required 8/5 maintenance to sustain an operable and highly available state. The infrastructure was deployed in Azure based on the pay-as-you-go model and the Customer experienced overheads even when a single infrastructure component was overloaded. So, the Customer wanted to optimize their Azure-based infrastructure to keep it in line with the predefined cloud billing quotes, and maintain the apps’ stable functioning.

Solution

The Customer chose ScienceSoft for the infrastructure support and optimization due to our previous successful cooperation on the modernization of their educational applications.

ScienceSoft’s support team ensured daily monitoring of applications’ databases and cloud services and conducted Azure health checks to identify cloud consumption problems, quickly handle issues with apps’ performance and define the long-term trends for cloud cost optimization. The team submitted monthly reports and budget breakdowns as well as proposals for cloud service adjustments, which could improve the apps’ performance and availability and decrease the cloud costs.

To reduce the load on the databases, the support team created scripts for automated data cleansing and archiving and enabled regular transferring of the outdated and non-current data to a new separate database. This measure helped decrease the costs of Azure SQL databases.

Also, the team ran L2 and L3 support to resolve problems raised by app users and troubleshoot the issues revealed during the infrastructure health checks.

To ensure infrastructure security and data safety, the support team managed identity and access policies and performed regular data backups.

Results

Due to ScienceSoft’s help, the Customer managed to reduce Azure cloud costs by 25%, increased the apps’ availability, and the end-user satisfaction level with apps’ performance.

Technologies and Tools

Microsoft Azure, .NET, .NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Core, IIS web server.