Vanin

Vanin, Belgium’s largest educational publisher, entrusted us to modernize and optimize its cloud infrastructure. Throughout our partnership, we’ve facilitated a seamless migration to the cloud, implemented DevOps principles, and crafted a scalable, cost-effective infrastructure ensuring Vanin’s digital platforms deliver smooth and efficient educational experiences to teachers and students.

About Vanin

Vanin is a leading educational publisher in Belgium, specializing in creating innovative learning materials for primary and secondary education. Their core focus is to provide both digital and printed educational solutions that enhance learning efficiency and improve the learning experience for students and teachers. With a commitment to integrating modern educational technologies, Vanin plays a critical role in the Belgian education sector through its adaptive and inclusive learning platforms like Bingel and Diddit.

The Situation

As Vanin expanded its digital platforms, it became clear that their existing infrastructure needed to catch up with the demands of modern education technology. The need for a scalable, secure, and highly available infrastructure became pressing, particularly as more schools adopted Vanin's platforms. In addition, they needed to improve their development processes to deliver new features and updates faster.

The IT Question

Vanin's primary challenge was: how can we migrate our infrastructure to the cloud, streamline our development processes, and ensure scalability to handle growing demand while optimizing costs?

The Business Behind the Question

Vanin’s digital platforms are mission-critical to their business model. As schools increasingly rely on these tools to facilitate learning, any downtime or inefficiency could directly impact the educational experience of thousands of students and teachers. Ensuring seamless performance during peak traffic times, such as exam periods or the release of new educational content, was a priority. Additionally, Vanin needed to keep cloud costs under control as their user base expanded.

Our Solution

We provided Vanin with a comprehensive solution, executed in stages:

1. Cloud Migration: We migrated Vanin's infrastructure to the cloud, establishing an infrastructure-as-code setup to automate and simplify infrastructure management.
2. DevOps Introduction: We introduced DevOps practices to their team, streamlining their workflow and improving collaboration between developers and operations. This significantly increased the deployment cycle, allowing Vanin to roll out new features more quickly and efficiently.
3. Scalability and Cost Efficiency: We optimized their cloud infrastructure for scalability, allowing it to handle sudden spikes in traffic without service interruptions while optimizing resources to reduce operational costs.
4. CI/CD Strategy: We implemented a Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) strategy, which enabled Vanin to automate their testing and deployment processes. We also set up and maintained their CI/CD pipelines to ensure ongoing reliability.
5. Multi-Account Deployment Environments: To streamline development and testing, we established separate Development, Staging, and Production environments in a multi-account setup, ensuring that changes were safely tested before being rolled out.
6. Kubernetes Migration: To enhance scalability, we designed a Kubernetes setup and successfully migrated their applications to this containerized environment, improving flexibility and resource management.

The Mission-Critical Transformation

Through this collaboration, Vanin’s digital infrastructure has undergone a mission-critical transformation. They now benefit from a fully scalable, cost-effective cloud solution that supports their growth and enables them to deliver new educational tools at a rapid pace. Their applications can handle high traffic periods, ensuring smooth, uninterrupted service to students and teachers alike, and their development process has become more agile and efficient thanks to the CI/CD pipelines and Kubernetes setup.

With this transformation, Vanin continues to lead in educational innovation, providing tools that help shape the education of tomorrow.