Diário Escola has grown with Google Cloud to offer multiple school management solutions
About Diário Escola
The goal of Diário Escola, an education management system, is to improve education by bringing people together through technology. This education superapp offers multiple communication and management solutions so that both schools and families can connect and build closer relationships.
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Contact usGoogle Cloud's help was invaluable to achieve a stable, flexible, and automated environment, freeing resources to focus on developing Diário Escola's superapp and customer support.
Google Cloud results
- Over 1.5 M transactions are processed daily
- 50% estimated increase in supported schools
- Integration with Google For Education
- Reliability, security, and convenient cost-benefit ratio
- At least 99% superapp uptime
More elasticity and scalability
Diário Escola is a Brazilian edtech superapp, and the team behind it is based in the city of Canoas (RS). Founded in August 2015, the organization currently has 46 employees, covering multiple areas, such as operations, customer support, product development, marketing, and sales. The superapp aims to deliver solutions to meet all the management needs of primary and secondary schools.
When education institutions use Diário Escola, they can access integrated tools and innovative features for organizing and streamlining daily school management tasks, including communications (notices, calendar, mural, surveys, authorizations, geolocation, and access management), pedagogical and academic matters (teaching plans, student reports and assessments), and financial issues (school fees, next-year registrations, collections, and cashflow).
One of the superapp's differentiating factors is its customizable features, offering quick, secure, and efficient responses to users' school management needs.
Present in every Brazilian state, Diário Escola supports over 100,000 students and 200,000 owners in more than 900 private schools. Figures have risen impressively in recent years due to the benefits provided by the cloud. Consequently, the superapp is ready to meet an even greater demand in 2024, especially as it relies on the support provided by partner FTD Educação.
However, Diário Escola's journey was not always like this. At the beginning, the edtech company relied solely on an on-premises provider based in Porto Alegre. This resulted in several technical limitations, which negatively impacted support and the system's lack of scalability. It was after the geographical reach and SLAs were impaired that other service alternatives began to be considered.
"We faced many issues with our previous provider, including an extreme weather event in Porto Alegre in 2016, which truly affected our operations. With no availability and stability, our system was just useless. That's when we realized we needed to assess other providers and search for new solutions. And we chose Google Cloud primarily because of its managed tools," says Marcus Drzewinski, Co-Founder and CTO of Diário Escola.
A journey of lessons learnt and new possibilities with Google Cloud
By migrating fully to the cloud, the organization intended to deliver more features to its customers. But this required several technical resources (including geolocation, data cache, encryption, authentication, queue management, and task scheduling) that were absent in the previous solutions used. Cost savings were also key to making this decision.
"From our business perspective, Google Cloud's reliability became crucial. Diário Escola was still in its early stages, operating in a niche market focusing on data protection and security. We needed reassurance, which the cloud certainly delivered."
—Marcus Drzewinski, Co-Founder and CTO, Diário EscolaIn 2016, the organization migrated to Google Cloud, expecting to find more convenient changes and deliveries. At that time, IT professionals working in the school management system relied on online tutorials and documentation on tools to deal with the implementation, which started with just a database and a server.
The solutions required for the superapp to run properly have now been enhanced. According to the team of professionals at the helm of the superapp, all operations are now cloud-based, including those related to customer relationship management (CRM), digital marketing automation, development tools, and people management.
App Engine is a fully managed application server where the entire system is developed. Also, among the solutions working in an integrated manner, Cloud SQL is behind many important tasks, such as database management, and Cloud Tasks is used for queue management so that tasks can be separated and performed independently.
"App Engine has provided us with a significant competitive edge. In practice, if daily data traffic rises, the number of instances also increases, and we can rest assured that the system will scale automatically. This means we can spend less time managing our infrastructure and focus on software development."
—Marcus Drzewinski, Co-Founder and CTO, Diário EscolaMore advantages besides Diário Escola's experience
The high levels of reliability, security, and cost-benefit ratios achieved by using Google Cloud were some of the benefits of the migration. Other positive impacts are related to environment stability, flexibility, and the use of managed solutions, including cost predictability features, which added to the organization's automated operations. The superapp's team can now focus on developing the education management system and supporting associated schools.
Figures speak for themselves. Today, over 1.5 million transactions are processed daily. Google Cloud consolidates the experience of associated institutions: uptime is at least 99%. And the company is planning to expand its services to a further 450 education entities, which will be added to Diário Escola's +900 customer base.
Integration with Google For Education, a service targeting institutions seeking to optimize their methodology, also contributed to school engagement and the use of features offered by the superapp.
"In terms of customer experience, our cloud-based education management system's high availability and scalability levels set our superapp apart from the rest, helping us attract, retain, and re-engage users, which is essential to our long-term success."
—Marcus Drzewinski, Co-Founder and CTO, Diário EscolaGrowth goes hand in hand with new requirements. That's why the organization is planning to expand, constantly improve, and develop tools to meet the demands of multiple scenarios and contexts.
The team expects to migrate from Cloud SQL to AlloyDB, a database service fully compatible with PostgreSQL, to support workloads from more demanding databases.
"We're also thinking of investing in Cloud Armor to protect our superapp. With this service we can detect and mitigate network attacks by accepting only approved requests. This means more security as we plan to expand our customer base, a goal that Diário Escola intends to reach in the short term," explains the company's Co-Founder and CTO.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Diário Escola
The goal of Diário Escola, an education management system, is to improve education by bringing people together through technology. This education superapp offers multiple communication and management solutions so that both schools and families can connect and build closer relationships.