Case Study: Udacity achieves 20x faster classroom load times in China with Cloudflare's China CDN

Udacity leverages Cloudflare's China Network to make their online classroom lightning fast.

Udacity, an online education provider of "Nanodegree" programs, set out to expand into China but ran into severe performance and access issues: strict internet regulations and slow connections throttled their US-hosted classroom assets (some users saw speeds as low as 20 Kbps), making pages take many seconds to load and threatening student retention.

Udacity solved this by deploying Cloudflare’s globally integrated CDN with a mainland China presence (20 PoPs via a Baidu partnership) to locally cache JavaScript, CSS and images, and used Cloudflare Page Rules for fine-grained control and troubleshooting. The result was a two-order-of-magnitude improvement in asset load times—from about 10 seconds down to 0.5 seconds—along with improved reliability and security for Chinese users.

Udacity

Paul Bauer

Platform Engineer