Case Study: Coursera achieves massive scalability and high-concurrency delivery for 6.3M learners with Akka

Making online education accessible with Typesafe

Coursera, the online education platform connecting millions of learners to university courses, outgrew its original PHP stack as its user base (over 6.3 million students and hundreds of courses) and development team expanded. The company evaluated Django/Python and the Typesafe Reactive Platform to address long-term needs for performance, concurrency, and developer productivity; Python/Django was ruled out due to dynamic typing, slower performance, and weaker concurrency support.

Coursera adopted the Typesafe Reactive Platform—using Play Framework and Scala, with Akka, Slick and sbt—building new services on Play and creating tooling to fit their environment. The result was far greater concurrency with minimal resource use, improved reliability (including scalable email sending with Akka and Amazon SES), about 20 Play projects in production (half serving user traffic) and the ability to serve tens of millions of requests per day.

Coursera

Brennan Saeta

Software Engineer