THE CUSTOMER
Steplab
During Josh’s early career as a teacher he witnessed first hand the limited coaching available, to support his first years as a teacher. This led to him having to work out many of the mechanics of teaching by himself, a sometimes slow and frustrating process. With more than a decade in the classroom as well as a multitude of roles including Head of Teaching and Learning at Oasis Academy, London, Josh is now a leader in the education sector. However, the memories of those early years remain strong, and drive his passion for ensuring that other future educators get the instructional coaching they need, especially at the start of their careers.
"Green Custard were incredibly helpful, supportive, knowledgeable and approachable at every stage in the process. They combined a personable approach with a highly skilled technical team to ensure that we felt satisfied and delivered great value at every stage."
Josh Goodrich
Co-Founder, Steplab
THE CHALLENGE
The first iteration of the Steplab product was developed by Josh and Ben and was relatively small scale. “The technology side of the product was just a solution to a problem.” (Josh Goodrich) Albeit small, the solution was well received and future iterations followed soon after.
In early 2020 the number of active users on the platform was far in excess of 10,000 and growing exponentially. Although previous iterations of the platform had improved upon the original, there was an upper limit on resources. In order to continue on their growth trajectory, the team at Steplab needed external support from Green Custard to; review their existing infrastructure; plan a route to an optimum infrastructure for scale; ensure security and governance remained compliant; lead the implementation of the infrastructural changes whilst also developing the Steplab teams knowledge on the new advanced infrastructure.
All whilst working within a relatively confined timescale and budget.
Steplab chose to partner with Green Custard, an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner whose own founders have been in their shoes, creating several start-ups from concept through to growth and on to success.
THE SOLUTION
The team at Green Custard completed a comprehensive audit of the existing infrastructure and produced a detailed discovery document of recommendations.
An action plan was detailed and working in close collaboration with the Steplab team, the action plan was implemented in priority order. An agile approach was taken to deliver impact quickly and to enable additional enhancements to be introduced as they were identified. Comprehensive testing was completed at each junction of the project including load testing, all set to a high level of acceptance.
It was imperative to Steplab that their team was able to learn from the Green Custard team with regards to the improvements made, and to expand their knowledge of AWS. In order to facilitate this and to aid a seamless transition of the completed work the Green Custard and Steplab teams worked closely together to aid learning through osmosis. A strong relationship developed between the engineering teams which continues to this day.
This accommodates a further requirement of Steplab's in that they now have a proven partner for long term technical Support and DevOps, as well as an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner for future phases of development.
THE IMPACT
Through Steplab's collaboration with Green Custard and AWS, Steplab now has a scalable product, which is resilient, compliant and cost optimised. Since Green Custard completed the first phase of work in collaboration with Steplab, their user base has already increased by 600% with the infrastructure adjusting to the additional load seamlessly.
Additionally, with the limitless capacity and ability to scale resources on the platform autonomously, the cost per user on the platform has actually decreased around 25%. Due to the new cost optimized infrastructure and economies of scale, the cost per user will continue to decrease.
The improved infrastructure introduced an enhanced development workflow and pipeline, enabling a more sophisticated and streamlined approach to rollouts of future updates and new features.
Through the unified working approach between both engineering teams, the team at Steplab further developed their AWS knowledge throughout the projected phases. Furthermore, it gave them the opportunity to deeply understand why certain decisions were made and raise any additional questions along the way. An added benefit to working in this manner aside from the additional learning through osmosis is that it dramatically reduces the technical handover at the end of the project.
Steplab can now focus on new areas of development safe in the knowledge that their product is fit for growth.