How TeraSky’s tailor-made AWS solution helped ThriveDX become a global powerhouse

Overview

On an annual basis, online Cyber Bootcamp ThriveDX transforms thousands of global learners into technology and security professionals. The educational platform utilizes hands-on practice labs and challenges, including their Live Lab – a unique ThriveDX value offering that challenges students to implement the ethical hacking lessons they’ve learned in class in live environments. The educational platform had big plans to expand internationally. To get there, they needed robust, reliable, and scalable cloud infrastructure to accommodate multiple and simultaneous rapid Live Lab development and deployment. The challenge was finding a solution smart enough to identify permissible Live Lab hacking activity while elastic enough to ensure load-balance at scale.

The Problem

Live Labs were originally deployed via virtual machines on student end stations. This process was extremely slow, prone to error, and required tremendous operational overhead. ThriveDX’s expansion ambitions required a completely new cloud-based approach that would allow them to deploy thousands of individual containerized micro-Live Lab environments simultaneously and consistently. While AWS was their cloud solution of choice, the platform had baked-in protocols that were identifying Live Lab activity as malicious and automatically shutting it down.

The Solution

ThriveDX connected with TeraSky and AWS to investigate possible solutions to the project’s central challenge: the scale of ThriveDX container workloads. In order to scale, typical architecture is composed of several externally facing services that spin multiple container replicas. With ThriveDX, each Live Lab was an independent service requiring dedicated external access points – a unique challenge in terms of route planning and scale. The deployment of all architecture components had to follow Infrastructure as Code best practices while allowing for the creation of several environments in different AWS accounts. To achieve this, we incorporated a load balancer and opted to manage the DNS via an applicative solution. Further, to orchestrate the deployment of new environments from start to finish, we established serverless automation through ECSFargate.

The Bottom Line

By integrating a turnkey solution with AWS, TeraSky secured ThriveDX’s highly available and scalable architecture, allowing the educational platform elastic constructs for move-fast, develop-fast EdApps production, and deployment – capabilities that have resulted in accelerated time-to-market at scale.

From ThriveDX

“Since we moved to the new architecture, we have expanded to three new continents and signed contracts with more than 20 universities in the US alone. Many companies in our industry went through a very hard time during the first year of COVID19. The new architecture allowed us not only to avoid a negative impact during these times but actually grow. Today we are one of the strongest players in the industry.”

From TeraSky

“ThriveDX represents one of our favorite types of challenges. It required a creative solution derived from the deep expertise of our team and our intimate understanding of our partner AWS. We are very proud of the solution we engineered and the resulting impact it had on our ThriveDX’s business growth.”