Verizon Learning Systems

Overview

Verizon’s "Learning Album" division managed a massive repository of educational content for thousands of employees. The system consisted of two core pillars: a high-volume authoring platform for content creators and a real-time delivery system for live classroom and self-paced training.

Challenges

• Database Bloat: Every version of every training module was stored as a full record in a MySQL database, making it unmanageable over time.
• On-Premise Constraints: Legacy hosting hindered elasticity, deployment speed, and modern DevOps adoption.
• Collaboration Friction: Large pools of authors needed a reliable way to collaborate on complex content sets without data loss.

Approach

• Distributed Versioning: Redesigned the authoring platform using Ruby on Rails integrated with Git, moving versioning to the file system and reserving the database for transactional metadata.
• AWS Cloud Migration: Led the end-to-end migration from legacy Terramark servers to a secure, scalable AWS VPC environment.
• Modernized Frontend: Rebuilt the student-facing delivery system using React and WebSockets for low-latency instructor-led events.

Outcomes

• Scalability: Separating content versioning from relational data allowed the system to scale indefinitely without database performance issues.
• Agility: The move to AWS and modern CI/CD patterns significantly reduced deployment times and infrastructure overhead.
• Real-time Engagement: The new React/WebSocket frontend provided a seamless, real-time experience for global training participants.

Technology