Scaling an Ed-Tech Platform When Thousands of Kids Log In at Once

At Finetune (a Prometric company), I worked on a platform that handled educational assessments for K-12 students across the US. Sounds calm, right? It is - until testing season hits and thousands of students log in within the same 15-minute window.

The traffic pattern nobody warns you about

Ed-tech traffic is weird. You go from basically zero load to absolutely slammed, with almost no ramp-up. A school district decides "today is the day" and suddenly your entire infrastructure is sweating. It's not like e-commerce where Black Friday is predictable. Testing windows can shift, districts overlap, and there's no graceful degradation option when a 10-year-old is mid-exam.

I got very familiar with our auto-scaling configuration on AWS during this period. We tuned it to be aggressive - I'd rather pay for idle instances than have a kid's exam freeze mid-question. That's the kind of failure mode that erodes trust with educators and schools, and once you lose that trust, it's really hard to get back.

The database was the bottleneck (it's always the database)

Most of our read-heavy operations - loading exam questions, rubric definitions, student session data - were hammering the primary database. I spent a good amount of time analyzing query patterns, adding strategic indexes, and setting up read replicas. We also introduced Redis caching for anything that didn't change per-student. The impact was significant. Response times during peak load went from "worrying" to "comfortable."

Frontend bloat was the other half

Scaling isn't just a backend problem. I led a refactor of the frontend architecture to break things into smaller, more modular chunks. The existing codebase had grown organically (as they always do) and bundle sizes had crept up. For students on spotty school Wi-Fi, that extra 200KB matters more than you'd think.

The refactor also made onboarding new developers way easier, which was a nice side effect. Nothing kills velocity like a new hire spending two weeks trying to understand how a component tree works.

The unsexy but important stuff

There's no glamorous takeaway here. It's just the basics done well: know your bottlenecks, cache aggressively, scale proactively, and don't let your frontend become a monolith. Not exactly a TED talk, but it kept thousands of students from having a bad day, and that's enough for me.