Eduphoria is committed to providing the best possible experience for the educators and students we serve. We want to share with you what we are doing now, and where we are growing, in our development and system improvements.
We want to provide more information regarding recent service interruptions and how we are improving. Ensuring performance, reliability, and data resilience are top priorities for our teams.
So what happened?
For transparency and accountability to our districts, Eduphoria documents all customer-wide performance events and limited software interruptions in our Online Help Guide.
The following performance events resulted in widespread service interruptions for districts:
These three events were caused by three different issues;
- Unintended impacts from an earlier software release,
- A failure of redis cache, and
- An influx of traffic to Aware Online Testing with lag in effective auto-scaling.
An essential part of the path forward is to avoid further interruptions as we make improvements.
Looking forward
From January 1 to February 28, 2023, 13 million online tests were administered in Aware. This is a 55% increase year over year. Online testing usage will continue to increase. In order to outpace district needs, we are committed to improving the online testing experience in the following areas:
- Performance
- Reliability
- Data resiliency
Performance improvements
Most features of our application suite, including parts of the Online Testing platform, continue to share computing and database resources. In the immediate, we’ve identified the following continued system improvements.
- Leveraging a specialized data store that excels at quickly reading and writing data
- Increasing default server capacity closer to end-of-semester levels
- This will better accommodate both the higher overall traffic and the increasing “peak” traffic levels occurring more frequently.
- Upgrading capacity and speed for fetching the cached data critical to the performance of student testing
- This includes data like a student’s basic account information.
- Rearchitecting other Aware Online Testing features and services by monitoring the current status of assessments, scoring algorithms, and processing
- Dedicating compute and data storage capacity similar to what has already been successfully implemented in the student “Save Response” service
- This ensures students who are actively testing are provided adequate, isolated, and independent compute and database resources for a robust, high-performing, and scalable experience.
Reliability
We measure reliability based on our systems performing intended functions adequately for a specified period of time. We target a 99.9% uptime and minimize any scheduled maintenance impacts. We are working on additional improvements to increase reliability.
- Enhancing monitoring and calibration of load and performance thresholds
- Creating a separate service solely for saving students’ assessment responses as they progress through an assessment
Data resiliency
A comprehensive data resiliency strategy includes backups, snapshots, mirrored copies of data, synchronous and asynchronous replication and off-site redundancy. Eduphoria already implements all of these functions and is adding more data resiliency for student response capture and retention.
- Capturing and archiving snapshots of student responses at the time of submission to provide a redundant copy of student response data as a student submits a test
- This is equivalent to keeping a copy of student answer sheets after the answer document is scanned.
Additional areas of improvement
- Providing real-time status updates giving direct visibility into current software performance for online testing
- Empowering students and teachers to know what actions to take if a student is experiencing issues during online testing
We know any form of technology or software interruption can have a significant impact on the educators that use Eduphoria. Interruptions are in direct conflict with the goals of our teams. We are looking forward to our improvements having a positive impact on your future experience with our software.
Thank you for your continued support. We are dedicated to serving our districts.
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