Case Study: Canva achieves rapid scaling and cost savings with Amazon Web Services

Canva - Customer Case Study

Canva is an online graphic-design platform launched in 2013 that lets non-designers create and collaborate on visual content using drag-and-drop tools and a large image catalog. Rapid user growth and a massive, image-heavy catalog created high storage and image-processing demands, so the company needed a scalable, cost‑effective infrastructure that could maintain performance and availability.

Canva built its platform on AWS—using EC2 (g2 instances) for graphics processing, S3 for storage (15M+ images), SWF for workflow coordination, CloudFront for delivery, and Heroku on AWS for the front end—running 22–33 instances as demand dictates. The result: fast deployments, near‑instant scaling, millions of daily image requests (400M served in Jan 2015), 100% uptime over six months, more than 1M users and 12M designs created, and infrastructure costs more than 40% under budget with only a few hours of weekly maintenance.

Canva

David Hearnden

Development Lead