City of Äänekoski
This customer story is also available in Finnish.
When the City of Äänekoski decided to modernize its early childhood education management system, the goal was clear: strengthen system governance, take development into its own hands, and provide staff with an intuitive tool for everyday work. The deployment of the eVaka platform with NordHero’s support delivered exactly this: a user-friendly, modern system that is agile to develop and cost-effective to maintain.
Äänekoski’s early childhood education services had identified a need to renew their management system so that development, change timelines, and total costs could be managed more flexibly. The goal was a solution that better supports the city’s own ways of working and enables long-term service development.
eVaka offered a new approach: a modern, open-source system where control transfers to the city itself. eVaka’s clear and intuitive user interface makes daily work easier for staff, while the open-source model guarantees the freedom to develop the service at one’s own pace, respond to changing needs quickly, and manage costs transparently.
eVaka evolves rapidly: new releases are published weekly, and an active developer community continuously delivers new features and improvements available to all users. This means that the system in use at Äänekoski keeps improving without separate upgrade projects.
Although eVaka’s application code is freely available, building its operating environment requires cloud infrastructure planning and implementation. This is where NordHero stepped in: as AWS specialists, NordHero brought experience in building similar environments for Finnish municipalities and cities.
Sanna Ruuth, Director of Early Childhood Education at the City of Äänekoski, describes the background of the decision:
“The decision to adopt eVaka stemmed from a need to strengthen our ability to develop digital services for early childhood education. During the procurement process, it was important for us to find a solution that supports staff in their daily work, serves families, and gives the city better conditions to guide long-term development. eVaka met this need with its openness, agility, and the fact that development does not rest solely with a system vendor.”
The Äänekoski project benefited from a significant advantage: infrastructure code developed jointly by NordHero and the Municipality of Petäjävesi and published as open source (github.com/Petajavesi/evaka-infra-opensource). This Terraform and Terragrunt-based codebase provides a ready-made architectural model for running eVaka on AWS.
Thanks to this infrastructure code, Äänekoski’s cloud environment did not need to be built from scratch. Ready-made modules for network infrastructure, database, container environment, and CI/CD pipelines significantly accelerated the deployment and reduced technical risk. In practice, this meant a faster timeline and lower costs for the city.
This is a concrete example of how a solution produced through collaboration between one city and an expert partner directly benefits the next adopter – and each user can contribute improvements back to the shared codebase.
The Äänekoski eVaka project progressed through close collaboration between the city and NordHero. Regular weekly meetings, clear division of responsibilities, and open communication kept the project on schedule. NordHero’s team brought strong technical expertise and a solution-oriented attitude to every interaction.
It was essential for the project’s success that Äänekoski’s staff actively participated in the planning and testing of the deployment. This ensured that the system met the city’s real needs from the very beginning.
NordHero CEO Pekka Malmirae describes the collaboration as smooth and inspiring: “Äänekoski took ownership of eVaka from day one. They wanted to understand how the system works and actively participated in every phase. That is the best possible starting point for a successful deployment."
Ruuth describes the collaboration with NordHero:
“Working with NordHero was clear, flexible, and solution-oriented from the start. It was important to us that the deployment was not carried out as an isolated technical project, but together, with understanding of the city’s needs and the reality of early childhood education. NordHero’s expertise brought confidence to the project and helped move the whole effort forward in a controlled manner.”
Äänekoski does not see eVaka merely as an early childhood education management system, but as a platform for broader digital development. The city plans to expand eVaka’s use in several significant ways:
Ruuth summarizes the city’s vision:
“We see eVaka as a platform on which the digital everyday life of early childhood education can be developed sustainably. Its impact is not limited to administration alone, but extends broadly to the daily lives of children, families, group-level staff, billing, management, and other personnel. The goal is that information flow, service pathways, and everyday processes become smoother so that more time can be directed to what matters most – children’s well-being, collaboration with families, supporting staff, and developing early childhood education. Open source and our own cloud environment give us the opportunity to be an active developer, not just a user of a ready-made system.”
Äänekoski’s example demonstrates that eVaka is a realistic and cost-effective option for municipalities and cities of all sizes. Thanks to the ready-made infrastructure codebase, the barrier to adoption is lower than ever – the next adopter can leverage the same foundation and focus on tailoring it to their own needs.
If your city or municipality is planning to deploy eVaka in its own cloud environment, the NordHero team is happy to help.
If your city or municipality is planning to deploy eVaka in its own cloud environment, the NordHero team is happy to help. Click here to contact NordHero.