About the Customer
Hatfield Online School is a South African online school started in 2008 with 4 students. Their dream was to impact the next generation through technology, making education accessible to all. Since then, they have grown to a school serving approximately 1,200 students. Its learning platform, Moodle, is central to daily teaching and learning, so availability and performance directly affect students and staff.
The Challenge
Hatfield’s Moodle environment ran on AWS, but in an account fully controlled by a third-party host. The platform depended on a single server that was prone to instability, and recurring DNS issues further disrupted access for students and staff. Before this, a previous host had imposed disk-space constraints that limited the platform’s growth.
Because the host owned the account, Hatfield had no direct control over its environment. It could not monitor resource utilization or identify issues before they affected users, and it had no visibility into its true infrastructure costs, as it paid the host a flat rate. Its data also sat in an environment shared with the host’s other customers, which raised risk and compliance concerns.
Hatfield needed a stable, scalable platform that it owned outright, and set out to migrate Moodle into a dedicated AWS account under its own control.
The Solution
Silicon Overdrive designed and built a new high-availability environment in a dedicated AWS account owned by Hatfield, in the Cape Town Region, and supported the migration of Moodle into it. The infrastructure was deployed as code with Terraform, with separate production and development environments. Traffic reaches Moodle only through CloudFront and AWS WAF; the application tier spans three AZs, so one failure does not take the platform offline.
Development mirrors production at a smaller scale, with a single Graviton (t4g.large) Moodle instance and a Single-AZ RDS MariaDB database. Changes can now be tested before they reach students.
Security and governance
- Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Config, and AWS CloudTrail for threat detection, configuration tracking, and auditing
- IAM least-privilege roles, AWS KMS encryption, and AWS Systems Manager
- Trend Micro Cloud One Workload Security and Conformity, with the environment assessed against a 95% Conformity baseline
- Amazon CloudWatch dashboards and the CloudWatch Agent for monitoring
Backup and recovery
Silicon Overdrive wrote an AWS Backup and Restore Policy, configured AWS Backup schedules, and ran restore validation tests: an EFS single-file restore, an S3 object restore, and an RDS restore to a new instance.
Migration and ongoing support
AWS DataSync was used for data transfer. Silicon Overdrive also provided Moodle advisory support and a post-migration cost optimization assessment, and handed over the reusable Terraform package to Hatfield.
The Outcome
Hatfield Online School now owns and controls its own AWS account and Moodle environment in the Cape Town Region, and no longer depends on a third-party host.
Stability has improved significantly. Moodle now runs on four load-balanced servers across three Availability Zones with Auto Scaling, so losing a server, or even an entire Availability Zone, no longer takes the platform offline. Shared data on Amazon EFS scales automatically, removing the disk-space limits that previously constrained the school.
Hatfield also has a separate development environment, so changes no longer have to be tested on the live system. Its backups have been validated through successful restore tests of EFS, S3, and RDS, giving the school confidence that it can recover its data when needed.
With direct access to its own environment, Hatfield can now monitor resource utilization, identify potential issues early, and see its true AWS costs, which were hidden under the previous flat-rate arrangement. Its data is no longer shared with other customers, reducing risk and strengthening compliance, while AWS WAF, GuardDuty, CIS-hardened instances, and HTTPS-only delivery protect the platform.
Finally, Hatfield received a reusable Terraform package that allows it to redeploy the environment to any supported AWS Region, giving the school long-term flexibility and independence.
John Blight, Online School IT Administrator at Hatfield Online School, said, “Partnering with Silicon Overdrive to migrate our Moodle platform to a new provider for our dedicated AWS account has given us full ownership, control, and peace of mind. While we rely heavily on their team for ongoing support, our platform performance and stability have improved significantly. This allows us to focus on delivering a seamless digital learning experience to our students without disruption.”
