eKool and Syself: A European and Sovereign Kubernetes Solution for a Software Serving 70 % of All Estonian Schools
Introduction
Serving more than 200 thousand users monthly, eKool is one of the top educational platforms in the Baltic region, helping schools manage their daily life and bringing them together with parents and students. In Estonia, their home country, eKool serves 70 % of all primary and secondary schools.
The Challenge
Not only do they need a reliable infrastructure to meet their users' expectations, but the nature of eKool's business also places high demands on scalability: their platforms go through peak access, such as the end of semester or after school holidays, and also through periods of lower access, such as weekends or holidays.
To meet this high demand for scalability, they used Managed Kubernetes on Azure to deploy their workload—services written in Java and PHP.
However, they were never fully satisfied with Azure. The costs were extremely high, and the quality was not keeping up, for example Azure's slow databases. Therefore, they started exploring alternatives.
After testing Hetzner's bare metal machines, it was clear they could get a much better performance at a fraction of Azure's cost. They also noticed a marked difference in database speeds.
The Solution
Dissatisfied with Azure, they wanted a solution that would enable them to run a cost-efficient Kubernetes setup, while keeping the servers in Europe for low latency to their users. For that, Syself was a perfect fit.
Our platform enabled eKool to have a cost-efficient infrastructure, with the scalability they needed. On top, they needed less time managing their infrastructure and were able to migrate without issues and as quick as possible.
Syself supported their team during the migration, gave advice on best practices for running applications in Kubernetes, and developed strategies for using virtual machines and bare metal servers in a mixed autoscaler setup. Thanks to this, they achieved a perfect balance between power and efficiency, even with their highly varying resource consumption.
As a European software company, sovereignty over their data and infrastructure is important to them and to their users. With Syself, they have full control over their infrastructure and nobody 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.
By using bare metal servers, their average API response times dropped from 110ms to just 52ms.
Now, their entire infrastructure runs on Kubernetes, including the main backend, databases and queues.
