Case Study: Coursera cuts build times by 83% and runs 300–500 daily builds with Amazon Web Services (AWS) CodeBuild and Amazon ECS

Coursera Cuts Build Times by 83% Using AWS Codebuild, Amazon ECS

Coursera, the world's largest MOOC provider with millions of learners and thousands of courses, needed to improve its front-end developer experience and website reliability. Its previous Jenkins-based build process ran on a limited set of EC2 instances, required building a monolithic site (later split into 50 apps), and lacked capacity to run many jobs in parallel—causing long queues, slow builds, and delays for back-end work.

Coursera switched to AWS CodeBuild with Amazon ECS/ECR and containerized build environments that include pre-warmed JavaScript dependencies, enabling 50–60 concurrent jobs and fully automated deployments. The change cut build times by 83% (from up to an hour to about 10 minutes), supports 300–500 daily builds, delivers significant cost savings versus scaling Jenkins, improves CI/CD and staging workflows, and provides more consistent, isolated builds and faster developer iteration.

Coursera

Bryan Kane

Senior Engineer