The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has led to the most significant disruption of education in history, forcing students to adapt to a virtual world to continue their learning quickly. While the impact of the pandemic has created challenges for just about every high school and college student, women pursuing a career in technology face an even steeper uphill battle as they try not to get left further behind in an already underrepresented industry. 

Girls Who Code, an international non-profit organization working to close the gender gap in technology, saw an opportunity to reimagine the learning space. By embracing a new infrastructure and Kubernetes-based technology stack, the company could operate at scale and provide women with more opportunities to learn how to code amid the “new normal.”

However, turning this idea into reality didn’t come without its challenges. Before D2iQ Kubernetes Platform (DKP), the Girls Who Code educational platform was supported by a growing number of legacy services and systems with insufficient observability and other core capabilities needed for production readiness. As the company grew and more students were onboarded, the platform experienced an increase in performance, scaling, and stability challenges, which had a significant impact on the user experience and reputation of the business.

“When things like the pandemic happen, you need to make adjustments,” explained Jessica Hunsinger, Product Manager at Girls Who Code. “We needed to do something about this issue fast. We realized that if we wanted to increase the average number of girls enrolled in a platform; we needed to switch to a solution that could support that.

Leveraging DKP to deploy Kubernetes on AWS, Girls Who Code was able to quickly stand up production-ready environments. Kubernetes clusters were created in hours instead of weeks. And when the team moved forward into production, migration to the new environment was seamless. 

“As soon as we implemented DKP, we had all the instances and VMs we needed up and running,” said Yuri Gubin from DataArt, a technology advisor and partner of Girls Who Code. “We had extensive monitoring. We had all the automation and CI/CD processes in place. It had all the templates to provision infrastructure on AWS. So, from a technical perspective, we were delighted with everything included in the solution. We didn’t need to solve it ourselves because DKP already solved it for us.”

With DKP’s built-in automation capabilities and native integrations with AWS, the team could provision, configure, and deploy new services and applications at scale, providing students with a world-class remote learning experience.

In addition, D2iQ provided ongoing technical support to Girls Who Code, so they could troubleshoot problems quickly and effectively when issues arise. 

DKP not only gave Girls Who Code the ability to adapt to the needs during a global pandemic but provided them with a flexible solution to operate in the future. 

Using containerized applications and Kubernetes running on AWS, Girls Who Code can provide young women with a solid foundation to be successful—both inside and outside of school.

No matter where the technology landscape is headed, Girls With Code has the cloud native platform and infrastructure in place to meet young women where they are and adapt to any situation that comes their way.