Panta is helping Blitz create a one-stop education service

About Shantu

Shantu is a Taiwan-based educational technology start-up founded in 2000. Currently, it has offices in five regions, including Taiwan and Singapore, providing online learning platforms for hundreds of schools around the world. Shantu is a bridge between teachers, students and parents, unlike traditional “teacher-student interactive” online education platforms. Firefly allows teachers, students and parents to publish and access information online, including setting homework, tracking students’ progress, providing feedback and sharing learning resources. The platform also provides back-office services for schools so that they can use online tools to set up courses, run clubs and participate in social activities.

With the rapid development of educational technology innovation, the interaction between educational institutions and customers is strengthening, and massive data brings unprecedented opportunities. Shantu has become the focus of Shantu’s exploration and practice in recent years on how to embrace the cloud native strategy, build application-centered modernized IT infrastructure, accelerate business innovation and improve customer experience.

Business challenges

Shantu, since its inception, has not only been competing with traditional education but also with emerging internet-based education companies. The original IT uses self-built private clouds. With the increase of business volume and expansion of business scope, the original private cloud infrastructure platform has encountered bottlenecks in resources, performance and services, which cannot support the rapid development of banks at the present stage. The main performance is:

• The high concurrency and peak access brought by the course product promotion business put great pressure on the network, application system and database, and the private cloud platform cannot support the ultra-high resource flexibility expansion requirements from the Internet business.
• The growth of enrollment and online people has put higher demands on the service SLA of educational institutions, especially the launch of overseas business, which requires close to 7*24 hours of uninterrupted service. Disaster recovery solutions based on the traditional DATA center model have a large IT budget, high cost, low efficiency, and increasing conflict between business continuity construction and rapid service development.
• Internet business development uses a large number of open source components, there are many problems, such as version instability, performance needs to be tuned, development interface is not friendly, difficult to upgrade, comprehensive development cost is high. With the increase of service volume and service types, more and more basic components are used, and the o&M side lacks automatic development and maintenance tools, resulting in huge pressure on the overall o&M.
• User demand for the change of market demand lead to business requirement changes very frequently, the traditional development mode, development and operations division is serious, lack of enterprise automation platform, development, testing, integration, deployment, etc online for a long time, the whole software system upgrade, alteration, expansion and migration, often social phenomena, such as overall risk is high.

The solution

Shantu has been migrated to GCP. The service system is deployed in three availability zones in the same region to implement service hypermetro in the same city. The VIRTUAL private cloud (VPC) is used to isolate tenants from other tenants, and the VPC network is interconnected to ensure secure communication between tenants and offline ERP and financial systems. For the routine panic buying scenario of course products, panic buying cluster is deployed on the GKE cloud container engine. With the rapid deployment feature of containers, 300 new containers can be added within 1 minute. Meanwhile, DDoS protection and exclusive bandwidth guarantee are provided to cope with high concurrent panic buying.

Business system is built, tested and deployed on Cloud Build of GCP serverless CI/CD platform, realizing business iterative development, continuous integration, grayscale release and fast online. GCP provides mature PaaS platform services such as Cloud Spanner, Cloud SQL, Memorystore and Dataproc, which simplifies the deployment, debugging, operation and maintenance of basic platform software and speeds up the application development cycle. The overall service migration process is carried out step by step. Initially, services are snapped up, and then services are migrated in one AZ, two AZs, and the Dr Area.

Customer value

GCP provides one-stop education platform solutions. Shantu has been transferred to GCP to provide customers with convenient and flexible one-stop financial services.

• Shantu has effectively supported the whole network business and the key purchase business.
• Online and offline integration, with omni-channel operation capability.
• Make full use of GCP’s mature platform component services to avoid repeating “building wheels” and focus more on business innovation.
• The launch of new business was accelerated, and the development cycle was shortened from month to week.