First Student, a leading US-based transportation provider, engaged N-iX to drive a massive digital transformation and consolidate its legacy IT infrastructure. Operating with a siloed landscape of over 100 applications distributed across multiple cloud providers, the company faced high operational costs, inconsistent data, and critical architecture governance issues. N-iX provided comprehensive managed services to architect and deliver a unified application ecosystem and a centralized data platform on AWS. Through this ongoing managed partnership, First Student successfully decommissioned 19+ legacy platforms, reduced maintenance costs by at least 30%, and established a single source of truth that prevented million-dollar operational compliance fees.
First Student is a leading transportation provider in the United States, managing massive fleets of school buses. The company is responsible for ensuring the secure, efficient, and reliable transportation of students to and from their educational institutions, managing complex daily logistics, vehicle maintenance, route planning, and driver scheduling.
Following the acquisition of a subsidiary and the legacy infrastructure (some over 15 years old), First Student faced the following challenges:
- Fragmented application landscape: The company owned more than 100 applications maintained by multiple vendors without proper documentation, leading to a lack of understanding of how systems interacted.
- Data silos and inconsistencies: High volumes of critical business data were stored in siloed systems, spreadsheets, and emails. The lack of a single source of truth led to inconsistent data across systems, resulting in severe billing issues.
- High operational costs: Infrastructure was scattered across Oracle Cloud, MS Azure, and on-premises environments. Furthermore, expensive third-party applications lacked essential custom functionalities tailored to the customer’s needs.
- Poor user experience: Dispatchers, drivers, and managers had to navigate multiple disjointed systems without single sign-on (SSO), dealing with inconsistent UI/UX and manual data entry.
If these challenges were not addressed, the customer would keep suffering from inconsistent data across systems. This already resulted in billing issues (not charging or overcharging for services), and a lack of insurance for some of the vehicles, which is why the company had to pay millions of dollars in fees. Also, data duplication and discrepancies already led to bugs in multiple systems, such as incorrect GPS locations of buses.
To consolidate their dispersed cloud resources and build a foundation for modern data analytics, First Student and N-iX chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their single cloud provider. AWS provided the robust, highly scalable infrastructure necessary to ingest data from 25+ systems. The customer chose AWS for the following benefits:
- The comprehensive ecosystem of data engineering services.
- Seamless integration with Snowflake for the data warehouse layer.
- Cost-efficiency compared to fragmented, multi-vendor legacy hosting.
First Student chose N-iX as the software development partner due to N-iX's extensive expertise in data modernization, cloud-native services, and enterprise architecture governance. N-iX is a trusted company with a practical background and an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner. Since 2002, N-iX has helped businesses across the globe expand their engineering capabilities and develop successful software products.
During the initial phases, N-iX demonstrated immediate value by conducting deep Enterprise and Technology Assessments of 135+ applications, accurately identifying technical risks, and mapping complex data flows. N-iX’s ability to provide a fully managed team, eventually scaling to 165 professionals across Ukraine and Colombia, ensured that First Student had the dedicated engineering, QA, DevOps, and architectural leadership needed for a long-term, end-to-end transformation.
N-iX delivered a comprehensive managed services and development engagement encompassing architecture governance, legacy modernization, and data platform engineering:
- Defining standards for the solution architecture: We have designed the architecture following best practices, such as the following:
- A unified tech stack for all applications and data analytics.
- A unified approach to data modeling and processing.
- Defined and implemented enterprise standards for systems integration.
- Migration from the monolith to microservices and micro-frontends: The managed team decomposed monolithic legacy systems into highly scalable microservices and micro-frontends. They modernized 8 core applications, including transportation management systems, in-bus tablet apps for drivers, dispatch monitoring tools, and parent-facing tracking apps.
- Centralized data platform on AWS: N-iX built an enterprise-wide data platform using an AWS Data Lake and Snowflake data warehouse. This platform ingests and standardizes data through a newly developed vehicle telematics gateway, aligning data operations between First Student and its subsidiaries.
- Data governance framework: N-iX implemented strict data governance, defining data owners, stewardship committees, and policies to ensure data quality, security, and master data management across all integrated applications.
- Managed support services: The main goal was not just to fix problems as they occur but to prevent them from happening in the future. Support services are provided during 12 AM – 5 PM ET to the 4 platforms vital for the customer’s business. We prioritized issues depending on their impact on the solution. For critical issues, the response time is no more than 30 minutes, and the resolution time is up to 4 hours.
As a result of massive solution transformation, the N-iX experts designed the data platform architecture, ensuring data governance and consistency across critical business processes. The platform consists of the following AWS services:
Networking and connectivity
- AWS Transit Gateway acts as a central cloud router connecting the networking, application, and core data VPCs.
- AWS PrivateLink provides private, secure network connections between the VPC and external data sources, such as Salesforce and Google PubSub.
- ELB distributes incoming data traffic across the ECS Fargate compute resources in the ingestion layer.
- VPC provides a logically isolated network environment containing the compute, ingestion, and persistence subnets.
Compute and container management
- ECS Fargate: A serverless compute engine running containerized workloads for data ingestion and processing.
- Amazon ECR stores and manages the container images deployed to ECS Fargate.
- AWS Lambda provides event-driven, serverless compute capabilities within the data lake environment.
Data integration, streaming, and orchestration
- Amazon MSK handles real-time streaming data workloads. The architecture uses MSK Connectors in the compute layer, MSK Main and MSK VTG in the persistence layer.
- AWS DMS facilitates the migration and continuous replication of data from external SQL databases into the AWS environment.
- Amazon MWAA orchestrates, schedules, and monitors data pipeline workflows within the compute and ingestion layer.
- AWS Glue: A serverless data integration and ETL service that catalogs and prepares data for the datalake.
Storage and databases
- Amazon ElastiCache for Redis provides in-memory data caching for high-speed access within the persistence layer.
- Amazon DynamoDB: A serverless NoSQL database used in the persistence layer for fast, flexible data storage.
- Amazon S3 is the foundational storage for the data lake, holding processed data and ingesting it to external tools such as Snowflake and Power BI Embedded.
Analytics and data lake management
- AWS Lake Formation сentralizes the setup, security, and access controls for the platform's data lake.
- Amazon Athena: A serverless query service used to analyze data directly in the data lake using standard SQL.
Security, identity, and governance
- AWS IAM сontrols secure access to AWS services and resources for users and roles.
- AWS Secrets Manager protects and rotates sensitive credentials, API keys, and database passwords.
- AWS Config continually audits and evaluates the configurations of the platform's AWS resources.
- Amazon GuardDuty provides continuous, intelligent threat detection to protect the data platform.
- AWS KMS creates and manages the cryptographic keys used to encrypt platform data.
Monitoring and logging
- AWS CloudTrail records API activity and account events for governance and compliance auditing.
- Amazon CloudWatch monitors operational metrics and logs for the platform, sending data out to external monitoring tools like Datadog.
By partnering with N-iX for managed services, First Student fundamentally transformed its operational efficiency:
- N-iX experts helped the customer successfully decommission 19+ core legacy platforms within 2 years, with plans to retire 10 more, reducing IT maintenance costs by at least 30%.
- We automated hundreds of manual processes and reports. Reduced task completion time by 44% and required clicks in management systems by 33%.
- Establishing a single source of truth for business-critical data eliminated inconsistencies, preventing million-dollar penalty fees and correcting billing inaccuracies.
Conducting a thorough Enterprise Assessment to map out existing data flows and risks was critical. Understanding the undocumented legacy landscape prevented scope creep and helped us create a decomposition strategy.
Implementing a strict data governance framework (roles, steering committees, and policies) before migrating to the AWS data lake was essential to prevent messy data.
Using a micro-frontend architecture allowed the development team to build a complex, multi-faceted system in the background while presenting a single, unified, and intuitive interface to end users. This ensured a smooth user experience.
N-iX is a global technology partner for Pragmatic AI Software Engineering, the practice of measuring what AI tools actually deliver on your codebase with your engineers before scaling them. With over 2,400 engineers across Europe, the Americas, and APAC, we work with Fortune 500 companies and enterprise technology leaders across finance, manufacturing, supply chain, and retail. For over two decades, we have built and measured software that runs in production.
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