Accelerating SaaS Success

EnrollWise™ is a Policy-responsive® K-12 enrollment software for modern school districts, powering application, lottery, and placement processes where system accuracy and uptime directly impact student access and family trust. As enrollment timelines compress and the regulatory environments evolve, districts demand rapid, reliable deployment of enrollment systems and quick turnaround on new features—without margin for error.

The demands for quality, release speed, and system reliability have never been greater, as more and more public school districts rely on EnrollWise™ for essential application and lottery processes.

SaaS Need for Speed: Navigating Modern DevOps Challenges

Prior to Tugboat, the EnrollWise™ team faced escalating deployment challenges, stemming from cloud vendor limitations and real-world business constraints:

• Painfully Slow Cloud Deployments: Each new release, regardless of scope, required upwards of an hour to fully deploy and test in an AWS environment. This led to bottlenecks at every stage—from code review to QA to customer sign-off.
• Release Agility Pressure: Districts often required urgent adjustments to enrollment logic. The slow and cumbersome process of deployment for testing made it difficult to respond with the required agility. In many cases, these changes were tied to policy updates or enrollment cycles with fixed deadlines, where delays could impact district operations and family experience.
• Unique Multi-Tenant Architecture: Each customer’s workflow required its own configuration, increasing QA scope as feature permutations multiplied. This level of configurability is essential to support diverse district policies, but significantly increases the complexity of testing and validation.

The development team, while highly skilled, was encumbered by these infrastructure challenges, making it increasingly difficult for Product and Engineering to accelerate delivery without sacrificing reliability.

Streamlined Multi-Tenant Previews with Tugboat

Tugboat fundamentally changed our development tempo. What once took an hour+ and constant coordination, we now preview and ship within ten minutes. Our process is more reliable. The team is more responsive and in sync. Clients notice the difference every day.

Oksana Cyrus
Director of Product, EnrollWise™

The EnrollWise™ team has already used Tugboat for LAMP-based projects like Drupal CMS development and saw the potential for a true paradigm shift for their SaaS development workflow: granular, tenant-specific preview environments, automatically spun up for every pull request.

Given the platform’s multi-tenant architecture and policy-driven configuration model, enabling reliable preview environments at scale was critical.

The primary challenge was adapting Tugboat to their non-LAMP stack while ensuring support for the multiple services and networking needed to operate EnrollWise™. Through collaboration with the Tugboat product team, a resilient setup for multi-tenant SaaS development was established, which has reliably supported the EnrollWise™ team since 2021.

I wasn't sure Tugboat was going to work for us—it was originally built for Drupal/Wordpress shops, and we are very much different. Once we got the setup dialed in for our Python/JS/GraphQL multi-tenant stack, it just… worked. 8-minute previews for every PR! I don't miss those 40+minute AWS deploys one bit.

George Griffin
Senior DevSecOps Engineer, EnrollWise™

Tugboat's core features addressed most pressing priorities for EnrollWise™:

• Previews for every tenant configuration that closely resemble production.
• Rapid environment spin-up—under-10-minute preview readiness.
• Streamlined QA Workflow.
• Always ready for an impromptu product demo.

The Results

The impact of Tugboat reached across the organization, delivering measurable technical and business results:

• Significant velocity gains
• Enhanced customer experience
• Fewer defects in Production
• Improved teamwork
• Savings on custom cloud spend

Tugboat’s tenant-specific, near-instantaneous previews directly linked technical implementation to business agility—transforming EnrollWise™ ability to delight and retain their school district partners.

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