Square Panda revolutionizes passive screen time by turning it into interactive, multisensory learning experiences, aiming to unlock every child's potential through literacy and language education. Inspired by co-founder Andy Butler's quest to support his daughter with dyslexia, the company has blossomed into an award-winning phonics system engaging early readers with evidence-based learning games. As Square Panda continues its mission to make a significant impact on children's education, it faces the challenge of enhancing its digital infrastructure to better support its innovative learning solutions. Engaging Tech Holding, Square Panda embarked on a journey to modernize its system, ensuring scalable, efficient, and secure operations to cater to its growing educational demands.

Square Panda faced significant hurdles with its digital infrastructure that threatened to impede its mission of transforming learning experiences. Their applications were tethered to outdated APIs, which were initially designed for an earlier era of operations. These APIs logged and stored information in a PostgreSQL database, which was then manually pushed to Cassandra for reporting, creating a fragmented and inefficient data warehouse. Over time, this patchwork assembly led to growing pains, including difficult maintenance, limited scalability, and a lack of adherence to best practices.

As Square Panda's educational offerings expanded, it became clear that a comprehensive overhaul of their system was essential. The challenge extended to data migration, where existing APIs and data structures needed consolidation into a new, unified version. This transition required accommodating historical data while also supporting future growth and data requirements.

Additionally, the need for enhanced scalability and performance became critical. The existing system had to evolve into a more secure and maintainable infrastructure capable of handling increased data loads and reporting demands. Ensuring a smooth migration and seamless integration of current systems posed further challenges, requiring strategic planning and expert execution.

To overcome the challenges Square Panda faced, Tech Holding implemented a comprehensive and modernized data pipeline. At the heart of this solution is a new RESTful API (v3) using API Gateway. This innovation streams data seamlessly through EventBridge and Kinesis Firehose into an S3 data lake, with AWS Glue efficiently processing the information to create a dynamic and robust infrastructure.

For data querying, Tech Holding deployed Athena for quick and flexible ad-hoc queries and utilized Redshift for handling more complex processing tasks. The team retained Cassandra to meet the real-time data needs, ensuring a balance between innovation and continuity.

Tech Holding emphasized scalability and automation by leveraging serverless AWS services, enabling the system to automatically scale in response to changing data demands. Additionally, Tech Holding introduced a CI/CD pipeline to streamline and automate deployments, allowing for rapid and efficient updates. Tech Holding implemented strategies to securely handle Personally Identifiable Information (PII), reinforcing data management trust and compliance. Through these tailored solutions, Tech Holding successfully modernized and fortified Square Panda's digital infrastructure to support its mission of enhancing educational experiences.

Results:

Tech Holding successfully transformed Square Panda’s legacy data infrastructure into a modern and scalable system utilizing AWS, significantly enhancing operational efficiency. This overhaul removed manual errors by automating the reporting processes, resulting in an always-on reporting layer that ensures consistent accuracy and reliability.

The newly implemented system offers unparalleled scalability, allowing it to grow alongside Square Panda’s expanding data needs while maintaining the highest standards of security for Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

Additionally, by preserving real-time data capabilities and ensuring backward compatibility, we maintained seamless access to real-time insights without disrupting existing functionalities. The comprehensive migration of all APIs and data was accomplished without any data loss, leading to improvements in system performance and reporting accuracy. Ultimately, Tech Holding delivered a secure, scalable solution poised for future growth, empowering Square Panda to continue its mission of enriching educational experiences for children worldwide.