How Evisense runs smoothly (most of the time!)

I’ll be honest with you – no tech is perfect, not even Evisense. We have never used a system at B Squared that has lived up to its claims. As much as we’ve tried to build a system that runs like clockwork, there are still times when things don’t go as planned. But here’s the thing: a lot of the stuff we used to have to worry about – keeping servers running, handling big surges of data, making sure updates didn’t bring the whole system down – those headaches are mostly behind us 

now that we’ve gone serverless. If you are wondering what on earth serverless means, well mostly it means we are not relying on a single computers to run our system, it is spread over many machines. Serverless sounds a bit techy, but what it really means for us (and for you!) is that the system can grow and scale without us having to manually manage everything behind the scenes. It just works when you need it to, no matter how many videos or photos you upload at once, or how many students you’re tracking. That’s a big deal for busy schools, where reliability is crucial.

However, being the realist that I am, I’ve got to admit we don’t get it right 100% of the time. Sometimes a new feature release might cause a hiccup, or something unexpected crops up, to be expected when we are pushing the boundaries of what serverless can do for us. But the beauty of the way we’ve set things up is that we can fix things quickly. Because our front end and back end can be updated independently, we don’t need to take everything offline just to make improvements. We can roll out new features gradually, ironing out any bumps as we go, while you carry on using Evisense as usual.

Another big win is security. We’ve got the ominously named Microsoft Azure Front Door keeping your data safe (think bouncers at a night club), and a Service Bus (think post sorting office) managing the flow of information. This means fewer outages and smoother communication across the system. And, with our custom-built media processing, those big photos and videos are taken down to a more respectable size to not eat into your quotas too much.

Of course, sometimes we make mistakes. I’d love to say we’re perfect, but that’s just not reality. What I can say is that when something does go wrong, we’re on it fast, and because of the way we’ve built Evisense, we can fix things quickly without causing major disruption to your day. And when things do go wrong, we have our fantastic support team led by the marvellous Lisa available to help get to the root of the problem quickly and answer your questions in minutes, not days! In the end, our aim is to make sure that you don’t have to think about the tech side of things – so you can get on with teaching, and we can get on with making sure Evisense keeps running smoothly for you.

Thanks for sticking with us, bumps and all!

NB ironically written at home whist my home internet provider sorts out a London wide outage L