AWS Cloud Transformation: Educational Volunteers Foundation of Türkiye (TEGV)

Introduction to TEGV

Educational Volunteers Foundation of Türkiye (TEGV), is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing equal and high quality educational opportunities to children across the country. Founded in 1995 by Suna Kıraç and a group of philanthropists who believed “education comes first”, TEGV’s motto is “As each child changes, Türkiye flourishes.”. Over three decades, it has become the most widespread educational NGO in Türkiye. TEGV focuses on non-formal education for primary school children (ages 6-14), offering after-school programs in subjects like science, math, arts, coding, and foreign languages to complement the state curriculum. The foundation operates through a network of 6 Education Campuses, 35 Learning Units, and 26 mobile “Firefly” Learning Units in 25 cities, strategically reaching disadvantaged areas where educational resources are scarce. Since its foundation, TEGV has engaged over 90,000 volunteers and delivered enriching learning experiences to more than 3 million children nationwide. Currently about 190,000 children annually benefit from TEGV’s programs. TEGV’s educational philosophy centers on nurturing well-rounded, creative, and inquisitive young individuals who embrace modern and universal values. All activities are provided free of charge, relying on a robust volunteer model and public support, with the mission of educational equality and the vision that every child in Türkiye should have access to quality learning opportunities.

Challenge

As TEGV expanded its reach, the organization recognized a pressure to transform its digital infrastructure to better serve children and support volunteers. In particular, the launch of TEGV Akademi, TEGV’s online learning platform, brought to light several challenges in scaling and modernizing their technology:

• Scalability & Concurrent Users: The legacy platform was a monolithic application running on a co-located single server, which struggled to handle surges in traffic. During peak usage (especially after school hours or during nationwide campaigns), the system could not scale, limiting the number of concurrent students and volunteers who could use the platform. TEGV anticipated growing demand (especially after the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift to remote learning) and needed an architecture that could scale on demand to accommodate more users – potentially tens of thousands of concurrent learners.

• Video Delivery & Content Performance: A core component of TEGV Akademi is rich multimedia content – educational videos, interactive lessons, and live sessions. The prior setup delivered videos in basic formats, leading to unwanted slow load issues for learners in various counties of Türkiye. Children living in rural or low-bandwidth neighbourhoods were especially impacted. The platform needed a more efficient content distribution method to ensure fast, smooth video streaming for all users, and support modern streaming standards (like adaptive bitrate streaming) so that even those on slower connections could participate without disruptions.

• Operational Overhead & Maintainability: Maintaining the monolithic environment required significant manual effort. Updates or new feature deployments were labor-intensive, often causing downtime. The tightly coupled architecture made it difficult to introduce changes or troubleshoot issues without affecting the whole system. With a small IT team, TEGV sought to reduce operational overhead by leveraging managed services and automation. They needed to simplify tasks like server management, software updates, and scaling, so the team could focus on improving educational content rather than constantly firefighting infrastructure issues.

• Security & Reliability: Given that TEGV serves children and manages sensitive data, security was paramount. The platform had to protect against cyber attacks and ensure privacy. TEGV would like to improve the prior environments security posture to meet todays standards. Additionally, high availability was a concern – any downtime or outages directly meant children losing access to learning. TEGV required a solution with robust security and improved reliability (minimal downtime), to safeguard data and provide an uninterrupted learning experience.

By 2024, it became clear that a digital transformation was necessary to meet these challenges. TEGV leadership decided to modernize TEGV Akademi by embracing a cloud-native approach. In 2025, TEGV entered a strategic collaboration with Sufle, an AWS Advanced Services Partner, to overhaul the platform’s infrastructure. The goal was to build a solution that could scale seamlessly, deliver content faster, streamline operations, and strengthen security – all in service of bringing high-quality education to more children through the cloud.

Solution

To address TEGV’s challenges, the team designed and implemented a modern architecture on Amazon Web Services (AWS), transforming TEGV Akademi into a scalable, secure, and high-performance platform. The solution leverages a range of AWS managed services and follows best practices for cloud architecture. Key components of the AWS solution include:

• Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate: TEGV Akademi’s application was containerized and deployed on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) using Fargate. This serverless container approach allows TEGV to run and scale containers without managing any EC2 servers. The application is now stateless and can automatically scale out to handle increased load, or scale in during off-peak times, ensuring efficient resource use. ECS Fargate provides built-in orchestration (for tasks placement, scaling, and load balancing) which simplifies operations and improves reliability.

• Amazon RDS for MySQL: The platform’s backend database was migrated to Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) using MySQL. Amazon RDS offers a managed, highly available database solution – automating tasks like backups, patching, and failover. The MySQL database houses content metadata, and other application data, and can now easily scale storage or compute capacity as needed without downtime.

• Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service): All static content and educational media (videos, PDFs, images, etc.) are stored on Amazon S3, which provides virtually unlimited, durable storage. S3 is used as the origin for video streaming content and file downloads. By offloading content storage to S3, the web application servers are freed from serving large files, and S3’s high throughput ensures many users can access materials simultaneously. S3’s integration with CloudFront and ability to host streaming manifests makes it ideal for the media-heavy needs of TEGV Akademi.

• Amazon CloudFront: To accelerate content delivery across Türkiye (and beyond), the solution uses Amazon CloudFront as a Content Delivery Network (CDN) in front of S3 and the web application. CloudFront POPs located in Türkiye caches content at closer to endusers, resulting in significantly faster load times for videos and static assets. With CloudFront, when a student in a remote town requests a lesson video, it can be delivered from the nearest edge cache instead of the central server, reducing latency to single digit miliseconds. This has dramatically improved the platform’s responsiveness and user experience.

• AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall): Security of the web application is reinforced with AWS WAF, which protects TEGV Akademi from common web exploits and attacks. AWS WAF filters malicious traffic (such as SQL injection attempts, cross-site scripting, or bots) before it reaches the application, adding an important layer of defense. This was critical to ensure a safe online environment for children and to protect sensitive data from intrusion.

• AWS Certificate Manager (ACM): To encrypt all user interactions and protect data in transit, AWS Certificate Manager manages SSL/TLS certificates for the platform’s domains. TEGV can provide a secure HTTPS connection to TEGV Akademi without the hassle of manual certificate provisioning or renewal. ACM automatically handles renewing certificates, ensuring continuous encryption and compliance with data protection standards.

• Amazon CloudWatch & AWS CloudTrail: For monitoring and observability, the solution relies on Amazon CloudWatch to collect metrics (CPU, memory, latency, etc.), log files, and set up alarms. This enables the IT team to track the health and performance of the platform in real time and receive alerts if any metric goes out of bounds (e.g., if traffic spikes and CPU usage grows, they are notified to scale up). AWS CloudTrail is enabled for governance and auditing – it logs all AWS API calls and changes in the environment. Together, CloudWatch and CloudTrail provide full visibility into the system’s behavior and a record of changes, which is vital for both troubleshooting and security audit requirements.

• CI/CD Pipeline with GitHub Actions: The development process was modernized by implementing Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) using GitHub Actions. The application’s source code is managed in GitHub, and any new code changes trigger automated build and test workflows. Upon passing tests, deployments are orchestrated through GitHub Actions to AWS. This pipeline automates the release process, allowing TEGV to roll out new features, content updates, or bug fixes rapidly and reliably. Integration with AWS services is scripted into the workflow, achieving a smooth push-button deployment process.

Collectively, this AWS-based solution provides TEGV with a flexible and robust infrastructure. The design emphasizes serverless and managed services, minimizing the need for manual infrastructure management. By using containers and microservices principles, it ensures that each part of the application can scale and operate independently, improving fault isolation and scalability. The inclusion of CloudFront and S3 directly tackles the content delivery challenge, while services like WAF and ACM fortify security. Crucially, the adoption of a CI/CD pipeline and AWS management tools has set the stage for ongoing agility – TEGV’s platform can continuously evolve without compromising stability.

Implementation and Modernization Process

TEGV’s journey from a monolithic architecture to a cloud-native platform was carefully planned and executed in phases. The modernization process not only involved technology migration but also a cultural shift towards DevOps practices and continuous improvement. Key aspects of the implementation process were:

• Migrating from Monolith to Microservices/Containers: The original TEGV Akademi application was a single monolithic codebase running on a co-located server. The first step was to containerize the application and break out key functionalities into separate services where possible. With guidance from Sufle (TEGV’s AWS partner), the development team refactored parts of the application to be stateless and modular. For example, the front-end and back-end were decoupled, and background jobs or media processing tasks were separated into different container tasks. The application was then packaged into Docker containers. By deploying these on Amazon ECS Fargate, TEGV eliminated the need to manage servers – the container orchestration automatically places tasks in the cluster and can launch more tasks as demand increases. The stateless design means any container can handle any user session interchangeably, enabling easy scaling behind load balancers. This move instantly improved reliability: if one container failed, others continued serving users, and ECS would replace the failed task automatically.

• Infrastructure as Code & Environment Separation: As part of the modernization, the team adopted Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using AWS CloudFormation and configuration management. The entire stack – from ECS task definitions and RDS configurations to VPC network setups and security rules – is defined in code. This made it possible to create separate environments for development, testing, and production that mirror each other. TEGV now has a development environment where new features and updates are deployed and tested via the CI/CD pipeline, without affecting users. Once validated, the same IaC templates deploy the changes to production. This separation eliminated the previous scenario of testing in live or having inconsistent environments, greatly reducing the risk of errors.

• Enhanced Security & Monitoring Practices: During implementation, special care was taken to bolster security end-to-end. The AWS WAF was configured with rules tailored to TEGV Akademi’s usage patterns. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and policies were tightened so that each service and team member has the minimum necessary permissions. All sensitive data (database passwords, API keys) were moved to AWS Secrets Manager or Parameter Store, rather than being in config files, improving security. On the monitoring side, CloudWatch dashboards were set up to visualize key metrics like user traffic, error rates, CPU/memory usage of containers, and video streaming performance. Alerts notify the team if something unusual occurs, like a spike in error responses or a sudden drop in throughput, so they can respond proactively. CloudTrail logs are regularly reviewed for any anomalous activities, and the team practices incident response drills leveraging these logs. Overall, moving to AWS provided TEGV with enterprise-grade security and monitoring tools that were not available in their old setup, increasing confidence in running a mission-critical education platform online.

Through these implementation steps, TEGV effectively modernized its platform without disrupting ongoing service to users. The migration was done gradually and this cutover was seamless to end-users: children and volunteers noticed the platform becoming faster and more reliable, without any major downtime during transition. The collaborative effort between TEGV’s IT staff and the AWS partner’s cloud engineers ensured knowledge transfer as well, so that TEGV’s team is now empowered to operate and extend the new platform on their own. By embracing cloud-native technologies and DevOps practices, TEGV Akademi is now set up as a stateless, resilient, and easily maintainable system that can grow with the organization’s needs.

Impact and Outcomes

The cloud transformation of TEGV Akademi on AWS has yielded significant tangible results, both in terms of technical performance and organizational capacity. Several months after the implementation, TEGV recorded dramatic improvements, underscoring the success of the project. Key outcomes include:

• Faster Content Delivery: By using Amazon CloudFront and S3, content load times have improved substantially. TEGV reports roughly a 50% faster content loading time for the platform’s web pages and videos. Lessons and videos that previously took long to start now begin almost instantly for most users, keeping children engaged and reducing wait frustration. This speed-up is especially notable for distant regions, thanks to edge caching.

• Increased Concurrent Users: The new scalable architecture allows far more users to access TEGV Akademi simultaneously. The platform can now handle 150% more concurrent users than before, over 2.5x the previous capacity. This means that large numbers of students can join online courses or stream videos at the same time (for example, during a nationwide live event or when a new module is released) without overloading the system. TEGV can confidently expand its outreach programs, knowing the infrastructure will support the demand.

• Accelerated Deployment Cycle: With CI/CD and a modern DevOps setup, the software release cycle has shortened dramatically. TEGV achieved a 60% faster deployment cycle, reducing what used to be multi-day or weekly deployment processes down to a matter of hours. They can push out new educational content or platform features in a fraction of the time, allowing the organization to respond quickly to feedback and evolving needs (such as adding new program modules or updating security patches promptly).

• Reduced Downtime and Improved Reliability: The combination of AWS’s reliability features and the stateless design has made the platform much more resilient. TEGV has seen a 70% reduction in downtime incidents. In practical terms, this translates to high availability – the platform consistently exceeds its uptime targets, ensuring that children and volunteers can access learning materials whenever they need. Even maintenance and deployments are often done with zero downtime, a huge leap from the frequent outages or slow periods of the past.

• Enhanced Video Streaming Quality: Thanks to the adoption of CloudFront, TEGV Akademi’s video-based learning experience improved markedly. The platform observed a 35% increase in the rate of high quality video streaming among users – in other words, a significantly higher proportion of users are now able to watch content in high definition. The adaptive streaming ensures those with good connectivity automatically get high quality, while others still get a smooth experience at lower resolutions. This metric highlights that more children are enjoying crisp, clear educational videos, which can improve comprehension and engagement.

Beyond the numbers, qualitative feedback from the TEGV community has been overwhelmingly positive. Volunteers have noted that system lag during virtual classes is gone, and parents report that their children no longer complain about videos stopping. The AWS-powered solution has effectively removed technology hurdles that previously impeded the learning experience.

Social & Educational Value

Importantly, these technical improvements have directly translated into greater social impact and educational value, aligning with TEGV’s core mission of equal opportunity in education. The robust online platform has broken down geographical barriers – a child in a small village can now stream the same quality educational video as a child in Istanbul. This is a significant step toward leveling the playing field. As TEGV stated, efforts like the digital platform and providing tablets to kids in disadvantaged areas are “to provide equal opportunities in education”. The modernized TEGV Akademi is the vehicle making that equality possible at scale.

The interactive and high-quality content delivered through Amazon Cloudfront is keeping children engaged. For example, a science experiment video or a coding tutorial can be watched in high quality, followed by interactive quizzes, all without technical hiccups. This kind of immersive learning was difficult to achieve on the old infrastructure. Now, TEGV can enrich its curriculum with confidence that every piece of content will run smoothly for the end-user. The organization has also been able to expand its content library, adding new modules in areas like digital literacy and STEAM education since storage and distribution are virtually unlimited with S3 and CloudFront. Volunteers, who facilitate online sessions, have more reliable tools – video conferencing and content sharing work without sudden disconnects – which helps them focus on mentoring children rather than dealing with IT issues.

By reducing downtime and improving access, TEGV ensures that learning is continuous. This was crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic when face-to-face activities halted; with the digital platform now strengthened, TEGV can continue its programs unabated even in extraordinary circumstances. In normal times, it means after-school programs are always available to any child who logs in. The ability to accommodate more concurrent users (3x increase) means that TEGV can scale up special events (such as nationwide coding workshops or virtual summer school) without turning anyone away. They can also onboard more volunteers to host concurrent sessions, knowing the platform won’t bottleneck.

Above all, TEGV’s enhanced digital platform reinforces the foundation’s social mission. By leveraging technology, TEGV is amplifying its reach to foster the next generation’s growth. Children who once might have been left behind due to location or limited local resources are now part of TEGV’s learning network, accessing courses in math, science, IT, and more through a simple internet connection. The quality and consistency of education they receive has improved, as evidenced by increased engagement and session lengths. In the long term, this contributes to TEGV’s vision of educational equality: every child, regardless of socio-economic background, can obtain the knowledge and skills to thrive. The AWS-powered transformation of TEGV Akademi is a prime example of how cloud technology can drive social good – helping an NGO scale its impact without scaling its costs at the same rate.

Conclusion

By embracing AWS cloud services and Sufle’s professional engineering approach, TEGV has successfully transformed its digital education platform and, in doing so, substantially advanced its mission of empowering children through education. The partnership with AWS and Sufle enabled TEGV to rebuild TEGV Akademi into a resilient, scalable ecosystem that can grow with the organization’s needs. TEGV can now deliver rich, interactive educational content to any child with internet access, securely and reliably. This transformation has not only solved the immediate technical challenges of scalability, performance, and security, but also positioned TEGV for future innovation – the foundation can experiment with new digital learning tools, knowing the infrastructure will support them.

In concrete terms, AWS enabled TEGV to fulfill its mission at scale: reaching more children (and in more places) without sacrificing quality of education. The case of TEGV demonstrates how a non-profit can leverage cloud technology to achieve a level of efficiency and impact previously attainable only by much larger organizations or budgets. It embodies the idea that technology, when aligned with a clear social vision, can be a force multiplier.

In summary, the AWS-driven digital modernization has empowered TEGV to carry out its vision of education for all more effectively. As Türkiye’s leading educational charity, TEGV can now confidently scale its outreach, knowing its digital backbone is robust and secure. When technology and social good intersect in the right way, the results are transformative – TEGV’s case study stands as a testament to how cloud innovation can help make educational equality a reality. With Sufle as a trusted partner, TEGV is well-equipped to continue changing lives, one child at a time, and truly live up to its promise that "as each child changes, Türkiye flourishes".