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Udacity Cuts Drive Costs 75% at Massive Scale

DoiT delivers real-time spend monitoring and optimization on Google Cloud, helping Udacity run up to 200,000 VMs daily while handling sudden demand spikes.

The Challenge

Udacity needed to manage enormous fluctuations in VM demand, sometimes seeing spikes of 2,000-3,000 VMs accessed in minutes. The company required extremely efficient IT spending to keep student costs low while maintaining highly-reliable services for their online learning platform.

The Solution

Udacity partnered with DoiT International for proactive cloud spend management on Google Cloud. DoiT provides real-time alerts for cost spikes, identifies optimization opportunities, and delivers solutions typically within 30 minutes. The partnership includes custom auto-scaling solutions and continuous monitoring of compute resources.

Results

Achieved 75% cost savings on drives by switching to balanced persistent disks
Experienced 30% enterprise business growth since the pandemic began
Enabled seamless management of VM activity surges and demand spikes
Freed up engineering time to focus on core education business rather than IT maintenance

DoiT has been central to our success with Google Cloud. They frequently reach out to us when spikes in spending occur, and they are incredibly responsive to our needs, typically finding solutions to our problems in 30 minutes or less.
Will Kessler, Director of Engineering, Udacity

Meeting massive scale demands

Udacity serves between 50,000 and 60,000 students whose support requires the use of 100,000 to 200,000 VMs every day. The company sometimes sees spikes of anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 VMs accessed in minutes. Google Compute Engine powers the VMs, and Google Kubernetes Engine is built into the hypervisor infrastructure to assist with managing and maintaining systems, helping the company handle surges with minimal or no disruption.

Proactive cost optimization

DoiT proactively informs Udacity when there are opportunities to reduce costs while maintaining the same functionality across compute resources. For example, DoiT once noticed the tripling of SSD costs over just a few days, alerted Udacity, and discovered the issue was related to SSDs becoming detached and not properly deleted. DoiT also recommended balanced persistent disks, which saved Udacity 75 percent on drives since making the change.

Supporting growth during challenging times

Throughout the pandemic, Udacity has seen large demand for nanodegrees as people want to learn skills that enable them to continue earning income while working remotely. Enterprise customers are increasing their investment in employee learning. One of Udacity's largest enterprise customers had employees complete an analytics nanodegree, and one student used that knowledge to identify efficiencies that could yield as much as $10 million in savings annually.

Enabling business focus

All of the work completed with Google Cloud and DoiT positioned Udacity to seamlessly manage activity surges and spikes in demand. Regardless of how quickly the company needs to scale up or down its VMs and SSDs, Google Cloud provides the requisite power and flexibility while DoiT maintains a close eye on spend, use, and opportunities for further optimization. This allows engineers and staff to focus on core business of educating professionals rather than IT maintenance.

Expanding into new specialties

Empowered with the right technologies and an efficient model for cloud spending, Udacity is expanding its nanodegree programs into even more areas. The organization is working on approaches to enable on-the-fly skills assessments and mapping while greatly personalizing learning experiences. Google Cloud and DoiT provide the agility needed to support increasing future demands and tap into analytics and microservices tools.

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