The Problem

In the world of school safety, performance degradation isn’t just a technical glitch, it’s a risk to student and staff well-being. Raptor Technologies provides the critical SaaS infrastructure that school leaders rely on for the entire safety lifecycle, from incident prevention to emergency response.

Following the acquisition of PublicSchoolWorks, Raptor’s engineering team inherited a critical MySQL deployment that now needed to support a significantly larger and more concurrent user base. While the system functioned, its underlying architecture was not designed for this level of scale or resilience.

The core challenge was architectural. Key business logic lived inside the database, making MySQL a coordination and execution point for application behavior. As usage increased, this design created contention during peak periods and tightly coupled scalability, performance, and correctness to the database layer. This architecture could not scale safely, as adding users or absorbing failures would only increase risk.

To support the combined platform and future growth, Raptor needed to solve three primary hurdles:

• Technical Debt: Upgrading legacy systems to MySQL 8.0 without service interruption.
• Architectural Bottlenecks: Legacy business logic lived inside the database, creating “choke points” during peak usage hours.
• Risk Mitigation: Ensuring that even a localized cloud outage wouldn’t take down life-safety services.

Barry Skidmore, Software Engineering Manager at Raptor, explains, “After the acquisition, we needed to ensure the platform could scale to support significantly more users while remaining operational and stable. That meant running on the latest production-ready technologies and optimizing how those systems handled load –starting with the database.”

The Solution

Raptor partnered with Percona to address more than a version upgrade. The goal was to stabilize the inherited platform, understand its true performance limits, and redesign the architecture so it could scale reliably with future growth. The work followed a phased approach: first stabilizing and modernizing the inherited environment, then addressing the deeper architectural constraints that limited safe scaling.

Phase 1: The Modernization Foundation

Percona’s experts guided the migration to MySQL 8.0 on AWS Relational Database Service (RDS). This wasn’t a “lift and shift”; it was a surgical upgrade designed to minimize downtime. To solve the resiliency requirement, the teams implemented a multi-Availability Zone (AZ) disaster recovery strategy, ensuring that if one data center goes dark, the safety of 60,000 schools stays online.

Phase 2: From Database-Heavy to Application-Driven

With a stable foundation in place, Percona conducted a deep performance evaluation of the production workload. This analysis revealed that MySQL was being used as an execution layer for application business logic, limiting throughput during peak usage. By decoupling this logic, Raptor reduced pressure on MySQL, and achieved:

• Higher Throughput: Removing application logic from the database reduced pressure on the write path, allowing MySQL to handle more concurrent transactions.
• Predictable Performance: Peak usage periods no longer caused “spiky” latency.
• Easier Scalability: The application layer could scalehorizontally, and independently of the data layer.

Key Takeaways

Raptor Technologies is the standard in school safety. After acquiring PublicSchoolWorks, Raptor needed to integrate and scale a legacy MySQL environment to support a large influx of users, all while maintaining the 100% uptime required for emergency readiness. Rather than treating the challenge as a simple database upgrade, Raptor partnered with Percona to re-architect how the system handled scale, resilience, and performance.

Key Outcomes

• Scaled to 6M+ users across 1,500 school districts with high concurrency.
• Resiliency: Modernized to MySQL 8.0 with a custom multi-AZ disaster recovery architecture.
• Increased throughput and peak stability by moving complex business logic from the database to the application layer.

About Raptor

Raptor was founded in 2002 with the mission to protect every child, every school, every day. Today, Raptor is a school safety partner for 60,000 schools in 55 countries, providing SaaS and mobile technology as well as comprehensive training and consultation solutions across the entire school safety lifecycle, ranging from crisis prevention and preparation to emergency response and recovery. Raptor’s globally integrated product portfolio supports a school’s foundation of safety and wellbeing, including Emergency Management, Campus Movement, Student Wellbeing and Safety Training and Compliance.