Case Study: Code.org achieves 20 million student reach and scalable, cost-effective infrastructure with Amazon Web Services

Code.org - Customer Case Study

Code.org is a nonprofit that promotes computer science education and provides free coding tutorials. In 2013 it set an ambitious four-month goal to launch the Hour of Code campaign during Computer Science Education Week and reach 10 million students, but its prior environment was a set of disparate websites and needed a platform that could handle extreme, short-lived traffic spikes while keeping costs under control.

Code.org rebuilt its platform on AWS using two stacks with EC2 (C3) front ends, Amazon RDS Multi‑AZ, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon CloudFront, Route 53, Varnish caching and Amazon SES, plus operational optimizations (read/write partitioning and instance right‑sizing) and AWS Support pre‑warming. The result: the site scaled from zero to about 20 million participants during campaign week, has reached over 25 million students and nearly one billion lines of code total, and reduced infrastructure costs by roughly half (front‑end instances fell from 21 to 2).

Code.org

Geoffrey Elliott

Software Engineer