Summary
To overcome the limitations and escalating costs of their previous cloud provider, the Italian EdTech startup AITech4T partnered with Automat-it to migrate to a highly scalable, fully automated AWS infrastructure. By transitioning to a Terraform-managed environment and replacing expensive file storage with Amazon S3, AITech4T significantly reduced operational costs while introducing robust CI/CD pipelines and enhanced security.
About AITech4T
AITech4T is an Italy-based EdTech company dedicated to transforming digital learning environments. Its AI-based educational platform automates the generation and management of digital learning experiences, from AI-driven recommendation engine and course aggregation, to slide creation using GenAI, virtual classrooms, and automated reporting.
The goal is for enterprises and training facilities to streamline course design and enable better knowledge retention for the end user.
The Challenge: Costly Storage and Rigid Infrastructure
As demand for its educational solutions grew, AITech4T required a highly scalable, reliable, and cost-efficient infrastructure to support customer-specific deployments and advanced application features.
AITech4T was heavily restricted by their legacy cloud environment. The existing infrastructure lacked the automation and flexibility required to keep pace with their growth.
The in-house team faced pain points, including:
- Escalating Storage Costs: The file storage solution provided by its previous cloud host incurred highly expensive write operations, driving up the recurring operational bill.
- Deployment Limitations: Existing infrastructure severely limited scalability options for rolling out customer-specific deployments.
- Manual Operational Burden: The environment completely lacked Infrastructure as Code (IaC), making infrastructure management difficult and preventing repeatable deployments.
- Missing Deployment Pipelines: There were no CI/CD processes in place for AITech4T’s VM-based components, forcing the team to rely on slow, manual updates.
The Solution: AWS Migration and CI/CD Automation
AITech4T engaged Automat-it to completely architect and migrate their platform to a fully automated AWS environment in the Milan region (eu-south-1). The migration focused on optimizing costs, implementing IaC via Terraform, and securing the infrastructure. Automat-it designed and delivered a comprehensive solution, which included:
- Optimized Storage and Compute: Replaced the expensive legacy file storage entirely with Amazon S3, immediately eliminating high write-operation costs. Deployed an Amazon ECS Cluster across multiple Availability Zones to host the ed-tech startup’s PHP Web Server and Java Recommender, alongside Amazon EC2 instances running custom AMIs for their Virtual Classroom Server and Neo4j database.
- Automated CI/CD Workflows: Reconfigured GitHub Actions pipelines to automatically push container images to Amazon ECR and deploy directly to ECS for both the newly built Development and Production environments, eliminating manual VM updates.
- Secure, Scalable Networking: Built Management and Production VPCs with VPC peering, Route 53, NAT Gateways, and VPC Endpoints. Access was secured using OpenVPN, while an AWS WAF with a Fortinet OWASP Top 10 ruleset protected the application layer.
- Robust Observability and Compliance: Integrated Amazon CloudWatch logging and Container Insights for full system visibility. Strengthened security posture using AWS CloudTrail, Amazon GuardDuty, and AWS Secrets Manager.
Following the migration, the Automat-it team completed a handover to the in-house AITech4T team.
This included an operation manual, final security report – including infrastructure security assessments and secrets leak scanning – and a thorough knowledge transfer sessions to empower the internal team.
The Results: Big storage cost saving & high availability
This strategic cloud migration allowed AITech4T to successfully modernize its infrastructure, unlocking new levels of scalability while driving down technical debt and storage costs.
Key Outcomes Included:
- ~90% reduction in file-storage costs: replacing the legacy file share with Amazon S3 eliminated the high write-operation charges that drove the recurring bill, and brought roughly 50% lower monthly run costs across the like-for-like core stack (compute, database, registry and storage).
- Manual VM updates replaced by automated CI/CD: GitHub Actions pipelines now build, push to Amazon ECR and deploy to Amazon ECS for both Development and Production, making releases repeatable and removing manual updates.
- Higher availability by design: the web server and Recommender System now run on an Amazon ECS cluster spread across multiple Availability Zones and monitored with Amazon CloudWatch and Container Insights.
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