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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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What they say

What I really like about DoiT's approach is that you're very hands-on and proactive. Satyam would ping me a few times a sprint, letting me know about the most current features, checking in on how things are going. When we are going through a peak time, that proactiveness makes a real difference. Satyam always comes through whenever we need support and helps us leverage the right experts to get us where we need to be.

Chiamaka Ibeme, Engineering Manager, Platform

SELECT has made important cost data readily accessible. I will often pull it up during engineering design reviews so we can quickly evaluate cost impact and projections and factor that into our design decisions.

Douglas Zickuhr, Senior Data Platform Engineer at Personio

I love clicking through SELECT to understand how our environment and workloads are evolving. I probably check it every day. It's coffee and SELECT for me every morning.

Ian Fahey, Senior Analytics Engineer at Loop

You guys have the best UI experience that I've had of any software. It's like you just read my mind where, like, oh, I wish I could click there. Oh, I can

Diana Koshy, Sr. Director of Data Engineering at Kargo

SELECT feels like exactly what Paul and I would have built if we had locked ourselves in a room for 18 months to create our ideal monitoring solution.

Devin McGee, Data Engineering Lead at Home Chef

SELECT dramatically lowers the cognitive load to understanding Snowflake costs. I'm able to sit there and easily understand what's driving the cost. Not to blow smoke up your ass, but it's just so easy to do in your platform

Blake Baggett, Head of Data Operations at Entain

One of the most helpful cost rituals we've setup from SELECT is the weekly spend digest sent to Slack. I can start high level and ensure things are in check. If not, I can very quickly drill down into specific workloads which may have driven the cost spike and remediate them before they become a bigger issue.

Michael Revelo, Manager of data and analytics engineering at ClickUp

Through SELECT's automated savings feature and deep cost visibility, we were able to instantly lower our Snowflake spend by over 40% and achieve a 20X ROI on our SELECT investment.

Skyler Chi, SVP, GTM Productivity & Excellence at Exiger

Our costs had jumped up 3X as we scaled, so we're talking about 60% savings in Snowflake spend after adopting SELECT.

Edward Mancey, GTM Lead at Synthesia

DoiT was a true partner, not a vendor. They helped us understand the problem, refine the vision, and build something production-ready far faster than we could have on our own. Their expertise, responsiveness, and commitment made all the difference.

Dr. Anish Kapur, Founder & CEO, Promptly

DoiT's Customer Success and Forward Deployed Engineering teams work very closely with us. The regular sessions with our CSM keep us focused on the right priorities, and the FDEs provide the deep technical guidance we need to validate decisions and optimize our environment. That combination has been genuinely valuable for us.

Alexander Lundberg Santos, Platform Engineer at Extenda Retail

Every customer has unique usage patterns. Manual resource optimization simply didn't scale—we needed automation to ensure every customer, regardless of size, had right-sized infrastructure without consuming our team's capacity.

Brad Quinn, Lead Platform Engineer, PlayHQ

SNCF

PerfectScale allowed us to grow capacity without growing cost. We effectively absorbed 30% more usage for free.

Thomas Comtet, Senior Staff Engineer, SNCF

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