In the era of digital transformation, many industries are leveraging technology to enhance their services and operations. The education sector is no exception. In this blog, we will explore how Cengage, a leading education and technology company, is using Apache Cassandra® to revolutionize the way students access educational materials.

The Problem

Cengage, the largest U.S.-based education and technology company for the college course materials market, has been undergoing a significant digital transformation. The company has migrated from physical textbook learning to digital content creation, launching Cengage Unlimited in 2018, a subscription-style service akin to Netflix for education.

However, the transition to digital wasn’t without its challenges. As Mike Heinen, the customer platform operations manager at Cengage, explains, the company’s Cassandra environments, which hold the keys to many of their centralized applications, faced stability issues due to minimal centralized management.

The Solution with Cassandra

Cassandra came to the rescue. Cassandra’s ability to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers while providing high availability without a single point of failure made it an ideal solution for Cengage’s needs.
Under Heinen’s leadership, the operations team at Cengage managed to enhance the stability of their Cassandra environments. This not only improved the reliability of their applications but also built trust within their app teams.
Cassandra now powers Cengage’s large test question ingestion application and content creation systems, which are critical to the company’s operations. The database’s scalability and performance have proven invaluable, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when online learning saw a significant surge.

Tech Stack

Cengage’s tech stack includes:

• Cassandra: Used for managing large amounts of data across many commodity servers, providing high availability without a single point of failure.
• AWS: Cengage heavily invests in AWS for cloud services.
• Kubernetes: Cengage is investigating running DataStax Enterprise on Kubernetes for container orchestration.
  

  The Future

  Looking ahead, Cengage aims to establish Cassandra as a Platform as a Service (PaaS), with all the necessary instrumentation in place to detect system stresses and issues before they impact application teams. The company is also exploring the possibility of running Kubernetes, further enhancing their infrastructure.
  Cassandra continues to be a significant player at Cengage, supporting the company’s mission to provide accessible and affordable education to students everywhere. As Heinen puts it, they want to make Cassandra a valued enterprise resource, a testament to the database’s power and versatility.

  Conclusion

  Cengage’s journey illustrates the transformative potential of Cassandra in the education sector. By leveraging Cassandra’s robust capabilities, Cengage has not only improved its services but also paved the way for a more flexible and responsive educational landscape. As more educational institutions and companies embark on their digital transformation journeys, Cassandra will undoubtedly play a crucial role in shaping the future of education.