Case Study: Busuu achieves scalable global growth and faster analytics with Amazon Web Services

Busuu - Customer Case Study

Busuu is a London‑based language‑learning social network founded in 2008 that serves 60 million users via web and mobile apps. Facing rapid growth and sudden registration spikes from app‑store features and marketing campaigns, the company needed to scale reliably, free developers from time‑consuming infrastructure work, and ensure a fast, consistent user experience for a global audience.

Busuu moved its stack to AWS—using services such as S3, EC2, SQS, CloudFront, Elastic Transcoder, RDS, ElastiCache, DynamoDB, Redshift, and EMR (with Kinesis in development)—to offload operations and speed development. As a result it supports ~60,000 HTTP API requests per minute and 3–4× traffic spikes, deployed RDS in 10 minutes (now holding 500M rows with 5M new rows daily), processes ~23 GB/3.5M learning events nightly with answers available in ~10 minutes using EC2 Spot, and delivers media quickly worldwide via CloudFront—enabling rapid growth without a large ops team.

busuu

Rob Elkin

Chief Technology Officer