When growth and success outpace cloud infrastructure

illuxi, based in Montreal, Canada, is a bilingual learning management system (LMS) and learning experience platform (LXP) provider. The company delivers customizable e-learning solutions for institutions, businesses, and the public sector. With a focus on creating engaging and scalable training experiences, illuxi supports more than 200,000 learners every month, including large-scale clients, such as the Montreal School Board.

As illuxi’s user base expanded rapidly, the company faced increasing pressure on its infrastructure. A growing content library, contracts that added tens of thousands of new users at once, and the need to meet strict compliance requirements created scalability and performance issues.

These issues became especially clear when a feature on a popular Canadian morning show drove a surge in traffic, causing illuxi’s platform to crash. At the same time, illuxi’s public-sector clients demanded SOC 2 compliance, requiring enhanced security controls and real-time threat monitoring. Maintaining the existing infrastructure consumed engineers’ time, leaving less capacity for product innovation.

illuxi needed a solution that could:

• Scale seamlessly to accommodate sudden surges in users
• Improve system performance and resilience
• Automate security monitoring to meet compliance requirements
• Reduce infrastructure costs while freeing engineers to focus on product development

Cloud modernization from the ground up

To address illuxi’s challenges, AWS Advanced Partner Unicorne re-architected the company’s entire AWS environment with a focus on scalability, performance, and compliance. The engagement began with an AWS Well-Architected Review that surfaced twelve key recommendations. Rather than simply listing problems, the review offered a clear, prioritized roadmap that showed illuxi where to start and how to maximize impact.

A major part of the project centered on modernizing illuxi’s database infrastructure. Unicorne migrated workloads to Amazon Aurora for MySQL on AWS Graviton instances, reconfiguring database parameters and refining query execution to make the most of Graviton’s architecture. This shift not only increased efficiency but also ensured the database could keep pace with the company’s rapidly growing user activity.

Scalability was another critical focus. To give illuxi the flexibility to handle fluctuating traffic demands, Unicorne implemented Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) with AWS Fargate. This architecture allowed workloads to scale dynamically in response to demand, eliminating the risk of over-provisioning while maintaining uninterrupted service. ECS task definitions were restructured and integrated with Amazon CloudWatch, giving the engineering team real-time visibility into containerized workloads.

Security and compliance requirements, particularly SOC 2, were woven into every layer of the new architecture. Unicorne deployed AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) and Amazon GuardDuty, customizing rule sets to monitor abnormal traffic and detect threats. GuardDuty alerts were connected directly to Jira Service Management, enabling illuxi to triage incidents within its existing workflows. To ensure consistency across environments, Unicorne also automated infrastructure deployment using Terraform (Infrastructure as Code), making configurations both version-controlled and repeatable.

Throughout the process, Unicorne maintained direct collaboration with illuxi’s engineers, establishing a dedicated Slack channel for real-time troubleshooting and architectural refinements. This close partnership ensured that solutions were not just implemented, but fully integrated into illuxi’s operations, giving the team confidence in the system’s ability to grow and adapt alongside the platform.

Major gains in cost, scale, and security

The modernization projects delivered measurable business and technical benefits:

• 30% infrastructure cost savings from migrating to Aurora on Graviton
• 20–30% reduction in compute expenses through AWS Savings Plans
• Seamless scalability, supporting a 10% month-over-month increase in active learners without service interruptions
• Zero unplanned downtime since implementing automated security and scaling measures
• 30% more engineering time redirected from infrastructure management to product innovation

“Scaling used to be something we had to plan for. Now it just happens,” said Philippe Richard Bertrand, CEO at illuxi. “We can focus on expanding our reach and building better learning experiences.”

With a stronger, more secure, and cost-efficient foundation, illuxi is well-positioned to support its growing learner base while continuing to enhance its platform. Thanks to Unicorne’s expertise, infrastructure is no longer a constraint. It’s a competitive advantage.