When a national childcare SaaS found its growth stalling under aging infrastructure and runaway costs, they didn’t just need a technical fix – they needed a true partner. Together, we built a roadmap to operational resilience and cost efficiency, giving their team the tools and confidence to thrive in the cloud era.
The Client & The Challenge
Serving over 37,000 childcare providers, our client sets the standard for childcare management software – but scaling that success behind the scenes was another story. Their mission: simplify daily operations for centers nationwide, with security, stability and reliability as nonnegotiable features.
Challenges & Pain Points
Stalled Scalability
Legacy AWS EC2 instances put a hard ceiling on how quickly the platform could flex to meet real-world demand – or scale down when business was quiet.
Kubernetes Without the Gains
The idea Kubernetes sounded great, but missing best practices meant the team absorbed all the complexity, with little payoff in speed or uptime.
Team on the Learning Curve
Even the most dedicated internal engineers felt out of their depth with K8s, risking missed steps and fragile operations.
Databases Under Pressure
Heavy queries hit the AWS RDS at peak times — slowing response times during the critical child pickup window and directly impacting the end customer experience.
Consequences of Inaction
Service outages were already common, and scalability was severely limited. Left unchecked, these pain points risked client trust and the ability to deliver on contractual SLAs. Furthermore, innovation velocity and future business growth was hindered by increased operational overhead, maintenance burdens, and dead-end infrastructure.
The Partnership & The Proposition
The call wasn’t for more hands – it was for a seasoned guide. DevIQ rolled up our sleeves, embedding with the client’s application, platform, and DevOps teams to co-create the path forward, always keeping their long-term ownership in sight.
Certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect · Kubernetes Administrator · Terraform Associate
DevIQ was more than a consultant – we were a sounding board and the steady hand that helped the client confidently modernize with reliable clusters, automated pipelines, and standardized infrastructure patterns designed to scale with consistency.
The Solution
Strategy & Approach
Every hero needs a map – and together, we charted one. Our shared strategy tackled reliability gaps head-on, automated what used to be manual, and set up a migration plan that put stability and the client’s peace of mind first. Success meant not just delivering a working solution, but ensuring the client could keep evolving long after our engagement.
Technical Execution
The team emerged with a robust Kubernetes environment, automated and observable. Argo CD plus SSO meant fast, secure, and auditable deployments. Terragrunt streamlined infrastructure-as-code, creating standardized patterns to deploy and scale efficiently and effectively.
The Results
Built and Shipped
Today, the client ships, manages proactively, and can grow confidently – without firefighting during peak application use.
- Scalable, Reliable Platform – Their new K8s foundation delivers uptime and elasticity to match business reality.
- Accelerated Release Cycles – Code-to-production time shrank from days to hours.
- Up-skilled Teams – Internal engineers now have confidence to maintain and continue optimizing their K8s infrastructure.
By the Numbers
- 50% Cost Savings – Estimated database cost reduction of up to 50% with smarter scaling and data decoupling.
- Automated Deployments – Release cycles that used to take hours or days can now be measured in minutes.
- 99+% Uptime – Improved total system availability above 99% via proactive and prescriptive best DevOps practices.
The Conclusion
Modernizing isn’t just about cutting costs or writing cleaner code – it’s about enabling organizations to grow without fear of failure or surprise outages. With DevIQ as their guide, this aging SaaS didn’t just upgrade or stabilize its infrastructure – they leveled up their team, their confidence, and their future readiness. Now, their engineers are leading the charge, equipped for the next wave of innovation, and prepared to own their success story from here on out.
