Case Study: Code.org achieves global scale and 20M participants with Amazon CloudFront

Code.org - Customer Case Study

Code.org, a nonprofit that expands access to computer science education, needed to launch the Hour of Code campaign during CSEdWeek and handle extreme, unpredictable traffic spikes while controlling costs. To meet this challenge the organization built on AWS and used Amazon CloudFront (along with other AWS services) to deliver tutorials and reduce load on origin servers worldwide.

By using Amazon CloudFront to cache and serve content from edge locations—combined with optimized EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing, Varnish caching, and Amazon RDS Multi‑AZ—Code.org scaled to over 300,000 concurrent users during peak and supported 20 million participants in campaign week (surpassing its 10 million goal). Amazon CloudFront and AWS support also helped the team cut infrastructure needs (from 21 front‑end instances down to two and removing roughly half their machines), lower costs, and enable 25+ million students worldwide to write nearly one billion lines of code.

Code.org

Geoffrey Elliott

Software Engineer