Empowering Estonian Schools: eKool & Syself's Solution
Introduction
eKool is one of the top educational platforms in the Baltic region, with more than 200,000 users a month. Schools use it to manage their daily work and to stay in touch with parents and students. In Estonia, its home country, eKool serves 70% of all primary and secondary schools.
The Challenge
eKool needs reliable infrastructure to meet its users' expectations, and the nature of the business also puts high demands on scalability. Traffic peaks at the end of a semester or after school holidays, and it drops on weekends and during holidays.
To handle this, they ran their workload, services written in Java and PHP, on managed Kubernetes on Azure.
They were never fully satisfied with Azure. The costs were extremely high, and the quality didn't keep up: Azure's databases, for example, were slow. So they started looking at alternatives.
When they tested Hetzner's bare metal machines, it was clear they could get much better performance at a fraction of Azure's cost. Databases were noticeably faster too.
The Solution
They wanted to run a cost-efficient Kubernetes setup and keep their servers in Europe, close to their users for low latency. Syself was a perfect fit for that.
On our platform, eKool got cost-efficient infrastructure with the scalability they needed. They also spend less time managing it, and the migration went quickly and without issues.
Syself supported their team during the migration. We advised them on best practices for running applications in Kubernetes, and we worked out how to use virtual machines and bare metal servers together in a mixed autoscaler setup. Their resource consumption varies a lot, and this setup gives them the performance they need at peak times while staying efficient when usage drops.
eKool is a European software company, and sovereignty over its data and infrastructure matters to the company and to its users. With Syself, they have full control over their infrastructure, and nobody else has access to their sensitive user data.
Results
After the migration to Syself on Hetzner, they reduced their cloud costs by over 70% and haven’t had a single infrastructure-related incident in more than a year.
On bare metal servers, their average API response time dropped from 110ms to 52ms.
Their entire infrastructure now runs on Kubernetes, including the main backend, databases, and queues.
