Cadmus joins AWS EdStart

Over the years, Cadmus has worked with Higher Education providers, including the University of Melbourne, Edith Cowan University, and the University of Birmingham, to deliver high-quality assessment experiences to hundreds of thousands of students. Our platform gives academics the ability to design engaging assessment pieces for students, delivered through our supportive online learning environment. With big dreams of transforming education globally, without compromising on user experience and quality, we knew we needed to build a platform designed to scale — a platform backed by the AWS Cloud infrastructure.

AWS Cloud has always provided Cadmus with the confidence and tools needed to build a scalable, enterprise solution. We're now excited to announce that we are members of the AWS EdStart Accelerator Program.

AWS EdStart is a startup accelerator looking to help companies build the next generation of educational technology solutions on the AWS Cloud. The program has given Cadmus access to the technical expertise needed to scale our platform, as well as increased exposure and connections to a network of EdTech customers and entrepreneurs. With AWS guidance and support available across various business units, our Engineering, Sales, and Marketing teams have all benefited from the program.

How Cadmus uses AWS

It was always important to us that we provide our customers with a trustworthy and reliable service from the very beginning. With a small engineering team, access to secure enterprise-level services through AWS was invaluable. Cadmus now uses AWS Cloud to deploy and deliver our Elixir-based backend and React frontends and store data. This gives the team the flexibility to use AWS offerings to architect various solutions, ensuring the best fit for our needs. 

Currently, Cadmus' scalable in-house deployment system uses Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), auto-scaling groups of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR). We can easily deploy services to this platform and connect them to a public, but firewalled, Application Load Balancer or an internal Network Load Balancer.

Our live learning analytics processing pipeline, which provides universities with insight into learner engagement and assessment processes, is built with Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, Amazon RedShift, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Firehose’s Lambda support allows us to mix in serverless compute and aggregations while processing the live data stream.

This foundation has given us the ability to easily replicate the Cadmus platform in new customers' geographic locations, providing a fast and regionally compliant solution.

Looking forward with AWS

As we continue to expand our product globally, a key focus area is in hardening IT standards, compliance, and security. Being completely AWS Cloud-based, the Engineering team is looking to leverage AWS Security Hub to manage compliance requirements and other AWS security offerings to improve our security posture.

We see AWS as vital to our success as we enter our next stage of growth, and are grateful for the opportunity to join the EdStart program. With ongoing support from the EdStart team, Amazon cloud architects, and AWS Marketplace solutions, we're confident we can continue to tackle any technical challenges and meet our customers’ needs.