Long before Covid was a thing, in 2017, the New Ukrainian School education reform was initiated. One of the NUS principles was formulated as a maximum digitalization of the education process, which could ensure convenience for all students. It was then that digital educational solutions made by Ukrainian developers emerged, and, among them, HUMAN company platform, used by around 1M students, their parents, and teachers from over 3,000 institutions all over Ukraine.

HUMAN is a Ukrainian EdTech company that develops and implements products made for education’s digital conversion. The LMS system the company created includes such components as e-journal, e-diary, class schedule, test-making, video lessons and extracurriculars, etc. It was decided to build the entire system as cloud-based.

Why EdTech moves to the clouds

HUMAN has been a GigaCloud client ever since its launch in 2018. The product took little time to develop, and only for a few months it was based on a foreign cloud operator’s platform, DigitalOcean. But as the company planned on working on the Ukrainian market, where there are legal requirements to student data storage, it was decided to move IDE to the Ukrainian provider, GigaCloud.

«We were looking into whom GigaCloud is hosting, and saw state enterprises among their clients. If a provider has such customers, it might mean that it is reliable. For us, the importance lies in stable operation, ability to withstand external risks,» says Vadym Khivremko, Human company product manager, «When we started, we were just a small startup with limited resources, and we estimated that time and finances we would have to spend on having own hardware wasn’t worth it, and it was better to entrust professionals who have it all set».

As educational systems store a vast amount of personal data, it is important for them to be protected against the external intervention and to guarantee safety. So they have to be certified in accordance with CSIP, otherwise it would be impossible for them to cooperate with Education Departments, schools, take part in LMS systems procurement, etc.

HUMAN significantly accelerated the certification process thanks to hosting in the public cloud with CSIP. Since the developers received a protected and already certified cloud infrastructure from GigaCloud. The only thing left for the EdTech company was to certify the operating system, software, and databases. Besides, HUMAN has also been audited for compliance with ISO standards. All this warrants that the product is safe and produced with a high level of quality.

This is what a «HUMAN School» interface looks like

Public to private cloud transfer

At first, HUMAN used a public cloud, but as the number of customers increased, they switched to a private cloud — there is more capacity, ample scaling opportunities, and other users on the server do not interfere at times of peak loads.

«We reached file storage limitations. The public cloud did not allow us to increase it further, so GigaCloud offered us a private cloud and helped set it up,» notes Vadym Khivrenko, product manager of the Human company, «And then the hardest task was to transfer this file storage, because it is quite large».

Data migration was carried out in January 2022. To transfer information, duplication between databases was set up, that is, the entire public infrastructure was deployed on a private cloud, keeping the data synchronization. At some point in the night, IP addresses were simply changed to private cloud servers, and then they began to gradually move resources from the public cloud. Users were informed in advance about the change, but for them this transition to another cloud went mostly unnoticed.

Although the final product, which students and teachers access, runs on a private cloud, all development processes HUMAN left on the public one. Thus, the company uses a hybrid cloud infrastructure model.

HUMAN system capabilities

Challenges the cloud helps with

«We have a productive cooperation with GigaCloud, full of regular challenges. During Covid, when there were sudden peak loads, and we had to scale up quickly on the public cloud. And during a full-scale invasion, when the entire economy stopped dead. We felt that there was some support from the provider. Of course, there are still many challenges ahead. But I think that together we will get by,» concludes Vadym Khivrenko, product manager of Human.

HUMAN is now trying to optimize the system by determining what functions take less capacity and in which seasons the individual services are used more. Currently, the educational platform has around a million users, and the number is only growing with new schools getting connected. And for such scale, a private cloud is ideal.