Case Study: Canva achieves 46% lower compute costs with Amazon Web Services

Democratizing Access to Compute Insights Using AWS Cost Optimization Tools at Exceptional Scale with Canva

Canva, the design platform serving 160 million monthly active users, needed a better way to control rapidly growing compute costs while scaling its workloads on Amazon Web Services. To do that, Canva worked with Amazon Web Services and used AWS cost optimization tools, including Compute Optimizer, Cloud Financial Management, Amazon ECS, and AWS purchase options such as Spot Instances, Reserved Instances, and Savings Plans.

With guidance from Amazon Web Services, Canva matched instance types to workloads, used Spot Instances for containerized and lower-priority work, and reserved On-Demand capacity for more critical Pro user projects. This approach reduced Canva’s compute costs by 46 percent, giving the company room to reinvest savings into AI-driven products while continuing to scale efficiently on Amazon Web Services.

Canva

Fawaz Ahmed

Director of Engineering