EdTech platform scales 40% without adding infra spend

The problem

Traffic spiked 3× during exam windows but the monolith couldn’t take it. We moved hot paths to autoscaling Kubernetes pods, cached video manifests at the edge, and tuned Postgres connection pooling — all without rewriting the app.

Our approach

We started with a 1-week read-only audit of the production environment, billing data and deployment pipeline. The audit produced a single-page proposal: quick wins (this sprint), structural fixes (this month), and strategic moves (this quarter). The client picked the sequence; we executed in two-week sprints with weekly demos.

Stack we used

What changed

• Infrastructure rationalised against actual workload patterns — no over-provisioning.
• CI/CD pipeline standardised so every service deploys the same way, reducing "works on my machine" cases.
• Observability added before any change rolled out — we measured the delta, not guessed at it.
• Documentation and runbooks handed over so the in-house team owns the system end-to-end.

What the founder said

"We expected savings. We didn't expect to also get a clearer view of where our infrastructure was actually spent. The team became part of our planning conversations, not just an outsourced ops vendor."

Founder, anonymised — full name available under NDA.