Challenge

Edgenuity has seen a rapid increase in business due to both organic growth and a series of acquisitions. To meet the increased demand, in 2019 they made the decision to increase capacity by migrating applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS). As they started to migrate applications to the cloud, they became increasingly aware of gaps in the way applications were built, tested and deployed. Dev, QA and product environments were frequently out of sync. Configuration misunderstandings were causing builds to break. No one single individual knew all the dependencies needed to build and run an application. Security checks were done after development released the application, sometimes causing applications to be sent back to development contributing to release delays.

Solution

In order to scale, they needed to accelerate their adoption of agile delivery processes and automate more. Edgenuity chose Chef as their automation partner based on Chef’s ability to support both where they were now and where they we’re going. The depth and breadth of coverage provided by the Chef Enterprise Automation Stack (EAS) gave them the tools they needed to support existing on-premises infrastructure and provide a clear migration path to the cloud. Chef’s as code approach provided the language they needed to enable automation for all parts of their organization and become more agile. Chef professional services offerings helped Edgenuity promote forward thinking in application delivery best practices and decrease their time to market.

COVID Increased Demands

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Edgenuity had to pivot to supporting an even larger customer base, going from supporting 500,000 to 5 million connections. It became apparent they were going to have to fast track their AWS migration efforts. Because of the large influx of students they could no longer bring the systems down at night to do the migration. Instead Edgenuity needed to migrate live applications with no disruptions to students. Without the work they had already done with Chef this would have not been possible. But because they had streamlined and standardized their application packaging and delivery processes they were able to not only migrate the applications to the cloud without disruption but also accelerate the rate in which they were able to release new innovations.

Impact

Chef’s shift-left approach to application delivery and security enabled Edgenuity to scale continuous delivery and compliance efforts across their organization. With Chef, they have continued to modernize and innovate while streamlining existing operations. Edgenuity can also execute service deployments into new environments like Kubernetes, without having to learn another tool to do so. They have also been able to:

• Cut cloud migration times by 32x. Reducing migration times from 4 to 5 days to 3 hours
• Reduced build and deployment times from 6 hours to 20 minutes
• Reduced the number of DevOps tools in use by 30%
• Able to deploy live application updates with zero disruption to student learning