Browns: Establishing a Modernised, Containerised Foundation for Resilient Educational Platforms

Overview

Browns English Language School required a robust and scalable infrastructure to eliminate persistent application performance issues and modernise its deployment practices.

Assembly transitioned the institution to a containerised AWS architecture managed through the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), ensuring long-term stability and automated workflows.

The implementation of an ongoing DevSecOps managed services model provided the school with continuous proactive monitoring, security governance, and cost optimisation.

This transformation resulted in a highly available environment that effectively supports the school's critical student-facing digital services.

Industry: International Education and Vocational Training.
‍Stage: Established enterprise scaling digital services.
‍Relevant Business Context: Browns operates critical student-facing applications and internal analytics platforms requiring high availability, operational stability, and secure remote access to support distributed operations.

The Challenge

Eliminating Instability and Modernising a Legacy Environment

The customer's legacy environment faced reliability, scalability, and operational management challenges that impacted platform stability and increased operational overhead.

The existing deployment processes relied heavily on manual operational activities, limiting scalability and introducing operational risk.

Browns also required improved governance, infrastructure standardisation, security controls, and operational monitoring to support continued growth and ongoing service delivery.

The Process

Containerised AWS Foundation with DevSecOps Governance

Assembly conducted a discovery and assessment phase aligned with the AWS Well-Architected Framework to identify infrastructure risks and modernisation opportunities across operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimisation pillars.

Key transformation initiatives included:

• Modernisation of application hosting through containerised workloads on AWS
• Adoption of Infrastructure as Code using AWS CDK
• Implementation of CI/CD automation pipelines for deployment consistency
• Establishment of operational governance and managed services processes
• Deployment of centralised monitoring, logging, and security controls
• Continuous optimisation of infrastructure performance and AWS cost usage

In addition, Assembly implemented an ongoing DevSecOps managed services model to provide operational continuity, incident response, security governance, and continuous improvement activities.

Managed Services

Assembly provides ongoing managed services support for the Browns AWS environment, including:

• Continuous monitoring and operational support
• Incident response and troubleshooting
• Security and governance reviews
• Infrastructure maintenance and optimisation
• AWS cost optimisation activities
• Continuous improvement initiatives

The Results

‍A Resilient, Secure, and Continuously Optimised Platform

• Infrastructure Resilience: Eliminated recurring "out of memory" errors through right-sized container resources and proactive alerting.
• Operational Agility: Accelerated delivery cycles through automated CI/CD, reducing deployment errors and manual overhead.
• Hardened Security: Standardised security posture by migrating from static credentials to IAM-based roles and centralised secrets management.
• Business Transparency: Weekly operational reports and monthly performance reviews provide the customer with clear visibility into system health and resource consumption.

Key Achievements:

• Containerised Foundation: Legacy environment fully replaced with a production-grade ECS Fargate architecture.
• DevSecOps Model: Ongoing managed services engagement covering monitoring, incident response, security reviews, and cost optimisation.
• Governance & Compliance: Centralised identity management, secrets handling, and audit logging established across the environment.
• Operational Visibility: Full observability stack deployed with CloudWatch and SNS alerting for proactive incident management.

Architecture Stack

Core Services

• Amazon ECS / AWS Fargate
• Amazon Aurora MySQL
• Amazon S3
• Amazon Route 53
• AWS Lambda
• Amazon ECR

Security and Governance

• AWS WAF
• AWS KMS
• AWS Secrets Manager
• AWS Security Hub
• AWS Config
• AWS CloudTrail
• AWS IAM Identity Center (SSO)

Automation and Operation

• AWS CDK
• GitHub Actions
• Amazon CloudWatch
• Amazon SNS

Resilience

The platform architecture was designed using distributed AWS infrastructure components and managed database services to improve operational resilience, scalability, and availability.