Our work included transitioning to open-source technologies and migrating from on-premise VMware vBlock hardware to AWS Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) technologies.

We spearheaded cloud adoption at DRC by exposing them to cloud-ready architecture styles they could leverage immediately and paving the way for an eventual transition to AWS. With an agile methodology, we built the web-based test system using various modern technologies.

The student-facing application became a single-page app delivered through a highly customized version of Chrome serving as a secure browser. The student application was deployed to AWS Simple Storage Service (AWS S3) and served through the Amazon CloudFront content delivery network (CDN).

Student assessments became available via an Apache Groovy/Grails Framework web service hosted on virtualized Linux servers in an on-premise VMware environment. Student voice responses can be recorded in real-time and streamed to AWS S3, where asynchronous, event-driven serverless Lambda functions transcode the audio to MP3 files for scoring.

The system is provisioned end-to-end with cloud-native IaC technologies. We developed additional platform components with Angular and node.js for dynamic and interactive web applications on the frontend. Additionally, we used TypeScript to enhance the JavaScript code with static typing and other features for better scalability and maintainability. We deployed CoffeeScript as an option for writing JavaScript with a more concise syntax.

For backend development, we implemented Grails, a web application framework based on Groovy, a dynamic programming language for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). We used node.js for cloud-native, serverless API development and development tooling.

AWS Lambda implemented serverless functions to run code in response to triggers from other AWS services or HTTP requests (node.js). We deployed Serverless Framework and managed serverless applications on various cloud providers, including AWS (node.js).

AWS S3 handled data storage and management to store and retrieve data objects, including static files, images, and multimedia content. Amazon DynamoDB was utilized as a fully managed NoSQL database for storing and querying structured data at scale.

The custom multi-platform Secure Browser and Chrome/Chromebook-based Secure Browser extension we developed represent a thin client, empowering DRC to deliver changes to the students during test windows. Previously,  schools and school districts had to interrupt testing to reload the thick client Java application on all their testing devices. 

The big transition was using flexible and web-based technologies. Flexion enabled DRC to pivot to delivering interim assessments in unsecured environments, which became necessary during the pandemic. Using only AWS technology, we also helped build an on-demand remote proctoring service to ensure that everyone who was supposed to be in a test was there. 

DRC has dramatically increased its client base and revenue thanks to the new platform, which is now scalable, cost-effective, secure, and reliable. Our efforts also resulted in a shift to a cloud-first strategy across the company. 

By enabling Chromebooks to use our thin client approach, school districts with budgetary constraints could choose this more economical machine, enabling DRC to support this (at the time) emerging platform.

By 2023 DRC has grown from delivering two million online tests across two states to 43.3 million online tests across 38 states annually. During their peak testing windows, they deliver up to 1.6 million tests daily (to over 487,000 students at once) with an average response time of less than 50 milliseconds and over 13K transactions sustained during peak usage periods.