Case Study: EF Education First achieves global scalability and accelerated digital transformation with Amazon Web Services

EF Education First - Customer Case Study

EF is a global education company best known for English-language lessons, operating in 116 countries with 46,500 employees. Rapid online growth (student numbers rose 170% year-over-year), rising competition, and limitations of self‑built, on‑premises data centers left EF facing scalability, disaster‑recovery, and agility challenges that slowed product launches and strained IT resources.

EF migrated its core business applications to Amazon Web Services, using CloudFormation, Direct Connect, RDS, DynamoDB, ECS and Lambda to build a globally unified, scalable platform. The move cut deployment times from weeks to days, enabled auto‑scaling that reduced server costs by more than 60%, improved disaster recovery and low‑latency access across regions, and set the company on a path to serverless, data‑driven innovation using AWS analytics and machine‑learning services.

EF Education First

Andrew Tsui

CTO