Case Study: Alef Education achieves scalable, reliable, low-latency learning for 120,000+ students with Aiven for Kafka

Alef reaches over 120,000 students with Aiven

Alef Education, a K‑12 edtech company used by over 120,000 students, faced scaling challenges with its event-driven microservices and was experiencing throttling and latency from RabbitMQ. After migrating to Apache Kafka on AWS, the team lacked the specialized resources to operate it and engaged Aiven, using Aiven for Kafka to manage their streaming infrastructure.

Aiven implemented a managed Kafka solution (and later Aiven for Grafana and InfluxDB) hosted in an Aiven VPC as the main data pathway between Alef’s learning platform and analytics. As a result, Alef Education scaled from 10 to 400+ schools, now handles over 2 million answered questions per day, cut feedback latency from ~3 seconds to ~1.5 seconds, met a 99.99% uptime target, and eliminated the ~20% of engineering time previously spent managing Kafka—reducing costs and improving reliability. Aiven’s managed services let Alef focus on product development while confidently scaling.

Alef Education

Muhammad Noor

Head of Engineering