Tespire Case Study: Microservices Rearchitecting and DevOps Transformation on AWS

Introduction

Growing platforms sometimes face a critical moment where their current infrastructure can no longer keep up with demand. When this happens, smart infrastructure decisions make all the difference.

Client Overview

Tespire is a SaaS platform built for the education sector. It allows schools to create their own customized portals for managing academic and administrative activities. With multiple institutions using the platform concurrently, performance and uptime are essential to maintaining trust and delivering a consistent experience for educators, administrators, and students alike.

The Challenges

Tespire faced significant architectural limitations with their monolithic application that threatened their ability to scale across Nigeria's education sector:

• Monolithic Architecture Constraints: Single large application making it difficult to scale individual components

• Shared Hosting Limitations: Unreliable performance with frequent downtime affecting school operations

• Laravel Queue Processing Issues: Multi-queue worker failures preventing background job processing

• Laravel Horizon Failures: Unable to properly manage and monitor queue workers in monolithic structure

• Limited Scalability: Individual services couldn't scale independently based on demand

• Development Bottlenecks: Teams blocked by monolithic deployment dependencies

• Technology Lock-in: Entire application tied to single technology stack limiting innovation

• No Environment Separation: Single production environment without proper staging/QA workflows

The Solutions

Tespire partnered with CloudPlexo to migrate from shared hosting to AWS and rebuild their infrastructure for scalability and performance.

Prior to rearchitecting, Tespire operated with:

• A single monolithic Laravel application on shared hosting
• All features tightly coupled in one codebase
• A single database handling all application domains
• Manual deployments affecting entire application
• No service-level scaling capabilities
• Limited fault isolation between features
• Single point of failure for entire platform

The solution designed by CloudPlexo ensured that the application could automatically scale based on traffic demand and remain responsive even during high usage.

Key components of the new infrastructure included:

• Compute & Auto Scaling:
  EC2 instances were deployed in an Auto Scaling Group to handle traffic surges efficiently. This ensures that new instances spin up automatically during peak demand and scale down when traffic drops.

• Automated Deployment:
  AWS CodeDeploy was used to automate application updates to EC2. The deployment scripts were zipped and stored in Amazon S3, where CodeDeploy orchestrates and deploys the application seamlessly across all instances.

• Caching & Queues:
  AWS ElastiCache for Redis was introduced to optimize performance by caching frequently accessed data. It also handles Laravel job queues, enabling faster execution of background tasks such as notifications, processing, and data updates.

• Database Layer:
  Tespire’s MySQL database was retained and optimized for reliability within the new environment, providing consistent data access during high-load operations.

Results

With the new AWS-backed architecture, Tespire now runs a stable, resilient application that scales automatically to meet demand. Downtime during traffic spikes has been eliminated, and job processing is significantly faster thanks to Redis-backed queues.

After the migration:

• Uptime improved from 94.2% to 99.9%

• Page load time dropped from 8s to under 800ms

• Tespire now supports over 5,000 concurrent users, up from just 200

• Deployment frequency increased by 1000%, and bugs can be fixed in minutes

• Infrastructure costs dropped by 60%, thanks to smarter scaling and automation

Conclusion

By embracing microservices and DevOps on AWS, Tespire can now focus on expanding its reach in the education sector, knowing the platform has been built to perform at any scale.

Need to modernize your infrastructure like Tespire? Let CloudPlexo help you migrate, scale, and thrive on AWS. Get in touch with us here