Department of Training and Workforce Development
WA's investment in TAFE.
The Department of Training and Workforce Development (DTWD) oversees Western Australia’s investment in Technical and Further Education, leading training and workforce development initiatives across the state for individuals, employers, business and industry.
DTWD manages thirteen public facing Drupal websites, including the TAFEs, Jobs and Skills Centres, TAFE International and Migration Services platforms. Together, the network supports more than 120,000 students and handles around 65 million requests each month, all managed by DTWD’s in house Digital Training Services team.
Full stack development. Infrastructure. Expert guidance.
Over almost a decade, the relationship has evolved from managed hosting into a deeply embedded technical partnership. Today, we work alongside DTWD’s internal Digital Training Services team across full stack Drupal development, infrastructure management and platform operations.
We provide Drupal expertise at every stage of delivery, from architecture and development through to deployment, support and optimisation. As the DTS team continues to expand its in house capability and take on increasingly complex work, we remain the technical backstop behind the platform ecosystem.
Additional services we manage.
24x7 support.
Continuous coverage for the DTS team, with enterprise-infrastructure SLAs across the estate.
Monitoring.
Application and infrastructure monitoring across all thirteen sites, with insights feeding ongoing improvement.
HA AWS hosting.
High-availability hosting on AWS, distributed across multiple availability zones for resilience.
Configuring environments.
New hosting environments stood up to match how the DTS team works, not the other way around.
Shared go-live.
Go-live processes managed jointly with the DTS team, so launches are smooth across the estate.
Security & compliance.
Signal Sciences WAF inspects all traffic at cluster ingress and egress. Virtual patching compresses exposure between CVE disclosure and remediation.
Scaling for the announcements that change the state.
When the WA Government introduced free TAFE courses during the pandemic, demand across DTWD’s websites surged. To support the increase in traffic, we rebuilt the infrastructure on a high availability Kubernetes cluster across AWS.
Today, the platform delivers automatic failover, on demand scaling and distributed workload management across multiple AWS zones. Designed to handle up to 5,000 requests per second, the environment keeps DTWD’s websites stable and responsive during major traffic events.
Inside the platform.
Kubernetes HA cluster.
Designed for sudden spikes in demand and traffic.
Always-on, with redundancy across the architecture.
Automatic failover.
Service continuity through automatic load redistribution.
Node failures stay invisible to citizens.
On-demand scalability.
Web nodes scale dynamically with traffic.
The platform breathes with public announcements.
Multi-zone AWS.
Workload distributed across geographically separate data centres.
Resilience and fault tolerance baked in.
5,000 hits per second.
Capacity built for the most demanding conditions.
Smooth user experience, even at peak load.
CDN integration.
Content cached and delivered via Fastly CDN, geographically distributed, with integrated DDoS protection.
Signal Sciences WAF.
Next generation WAF protecting all inbound and outbound cluster traffic, with real time threat detection and immediate virtual patching for newly disclosed vulnerabilities.
Zero-downtime deployments.
Deployments run without service interruption.
After-hours maintenance windows keep updates off the critical path for the DTS team.
Backups & disaster recovery.
Automated daily backups with defined RTO and RPO. Tested disaster recovery procedures across the estate.
Containerisation, done well.
Containerising thirteen websites introduced a wide range of technical complexities across infrastructure, deployment and performance. We adopted a poly site architecture that allowed each platform to operate and scale independently, improving resilience and overall performance across the ecosystem.
The caching strategy also required careful tuning. Following extensive testing, the platform was configured to reduce server load while ensuring users always receive accurate, up to date content.
Consistent performance. A more capable team.
The move to the new infrastructure delivered consistent performance and stability during major traffic events, with the cluster successfully handling every statewide announcement without disruption.
The partnership between our team and DTS has also helped strengthen internal capability, giving the in house team the confidence to evolve the platform, maintain strong engineering practices and continue building a culture centred around technical excellence.
Seven services across the partnership.
The DTWD partnership covers everything from QA on the team's codebase to architecture advice on new technologies.
Centralised management of thirteen public-facing Drupal websites across the DTWD estate.
Auto-scaling hosting built to support high load during registration days and public announcements — around 65 million requests a month.
Quality assurance as a service, auditing the internal team's codebase.
Enterprise infrastructure SLAs with 24x7 coverage across the estate.
Highly configurable through code, supporting the flexibility a fast-paced application development team needs.
Best-practice advice and recommendations on how to implement new technologies.
Application improvements guided by monitoring across the application and infrastructure layers.
Application updates and patch management across CMS websites.
The outcome.
Backing an in-house Drupal team?
We bring guidance and capacity where it's needed.