When Covid-19 accelerated the shift to digital learning, the client’s platform saw a surge in users and became their primary distribution channel - but it had been built incrementally over five years and was never designed for that kind of scale. They wanted to migrate the monolith to a service-oriented (microservices) architecture for scalability and performance, transform it into an open, integrable platform that could deliver and consume services with partners, add support for multiple regional languages beyond English, and streamline the offline model running on Raspberry Pi.
Re-architecting a five-year-old monolith into a microservices platform is hard enough; doing it so the same application runs both in the cloud and on a tiny offline Raspberry Pi staying in sync between them is harder still.
The platform had grown incrementally over five years and wasn’t designed to handle the surge in load it now faced as the primary distribution channel.
The same application had to run both in the cloud and on a Raspberry Pi for offline use - a significant architectural challenge, especially given the Pi’s limited ability to load the full application.
Keeping data consistent between the online and offline servers required a reliable synchronization mechanism.
The application only supported English and needed to support multiple regional languages.
As a monolith, it wasn’t open or integrable; becoming a platform meant exposing secure services to partners.
Focaloid migrated the platform to a fully decoupled microservices architecture retaining and refactoring the PHP backend, rebuilding the frontend in Angular, and engineering it to run lean in both cloud and offline modes.
Re-architected the application into microservices with APIs in PHP Laravel, retaining the existing PHP backend while refactoring the code for readability and maintainability.
Re-developed the frontend in Angular, using a key-value approach to translate the customer interface into multiple regional languages.
Developed common APIs consumed by both the web and mobile applications.
Streamlined the Raspberry Pi offline deployment so only the necessary services and databases are installed — making the app light enough to run offline.
Built a sync module to keep data consistent between the online and offline distributed systems.
Used JWT token-based security to expose the APIs to partners securely, with OAuth2 (Passport), Sanctum, and Socialite handling authentication.
Focaloid approached the migration incrementally - decouple, refactor, rebuild the experience, and engineer for dual cloud/offline operation.
Designed the move from monolith to a fully decoupled microservices architecture, defining services and shared APIs.
Retained the PHP backend while refactoring it for maintainability, and rebuilt the frontend in Angular with multi-language support.
Streamlined the Raspberry Pi deployment to only essential services and databases, and built the online/offline sync module.
Secured the partner APIs with JWT and validated the platform through QA.
When a learning platform becomes the primary way students reach their education, scale stops being a nice-to-have - it’s the whole game. A monolith that buckles under load, can’t reach offline learners, or can’t open up to partners limits not just the product but the people depending on it. By migrating to a fully decoupled microservices architecture that scales by usage, runs lean enough for an offline Raspberry Pi, and exposes secure APIs to partners, Focaloid turned a five-year-old monolith into a modern, scalable, integrable platform - one that performs under surging demand, reaches learners online and offline, and costs less to run. That’s how you scale learning without leaving anyone behind.
We migrate legacy applications to decoupled microservices - scalable, partner-ready, and even deployable offline refactoring as we go so your platform performs under load and costs less to run.