Case Study: Desire2Learn achieves reliable global access and scalable performance with Amazon CloudFront

Desire2Learn - Customer Case Study

Desire2Learn (D2L) is a global education-software company whose Brightspace platform serves millions of learners across higher education, K–12, and enterprise. D2L needed to guarantee 24/7 high availability for millions of students, handle seasonal traffic spikes (hundreds of thousands of database queries during term), meet varied regional student-data privacy requirements, and speed up feature development. To solve content-delivery and global availability needs, D2L adopted Amazon CloudFront as its global CDN alongside other AWS services.

Using Amazon CloudFront together with Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto Scaling, D2L achieved global resiliency, consistent security controls, and elastic scaling so it only pays for compute used. The move enabled dev/test environments to be spun up in minutes instead of weeks, allowed rapid rollout of new features (for example, a student scheduling tool deployed and iterated within weeks), and supports millions of users and hundreds of thousands of queries with reduced idle infrastructure and faster time to market.

Desire2Learn

Nick Oddson

Senior Vice President of Engineering