Case Study: Coursera achieves faster, scalable microservices and operational efficiency with Amazon Web Services (Amazon ECS)

Coursera Moves to a Microservices-Based Architecture

Coursera, a global online learning platform with millions of users, was struggling with a large monolithic batch-processing application that was hard to run, deploy, and scale. Jobs were run as threads with varying CPU and memory needs, causing inefficiencies and memory-limit errors that could take down the whole app. An earlier attempt to move to Docker on Apache Mesos failed because Mesos was complex to set up and Coursera lacked the resources to manage it.

Coursera moved to a microservices model by running Docker containers on Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS), with each job as its own container and ECS handling scheduling, cluster management, and orchestration. The change delivered a working prototype in under two months, cut deployment time from hours to minutes, provided resource isolation so teams can develop independently, enabled auto scaling for variable loads, and eliminated ongoing cluster-maintenance overhead.

Coursera

Frank Chen

Software Engineer