Case Study: Pond (New Zealand education platform) achieves scalable, secure, and cost‑efficient national growth with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Pond - Customer Case Study

Pond is a New Zealand education website that lets teachers and students share resources and ideas from a growing library of learning materials. Launched by a small development team, Pond needed an IT platform that could scale from thousands to potentially hundreds of thousands of users (60,000 teachers and 750,000 students), support media sharing, provide strong security and analytics, and avoid large upfront capital costs.

Pond built its infrastructure on AWS—using EC2, S3/CloudFront, Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing, RDS, DynamoDB, CloudFormation and Redshift—to achieve on‑demand capacity, secure storage and real‑time analytics. The site was developed in five months and has run uninterrupted since launch, lowered capital and operating costs, passed a global security audit, and supported rapid growth (over 7,500 teachers and 7,100+ resources with strong monthly activity) while remaining ready to scale to the entire New Zealand education sector.

Pond

Chris South

Head of Dynamic Services