Case Study: Coursera achieves 24x7 global on-demand availability with DataStax Enterprise

Coursera Delivers On-Demand Education On Any Device With Datastax

Coursera, the online learning platform partnering with top universities to deliver hundreds of courses to millions of students worldwide, needed to move from a scheduled remote-learning model to an always-on, on‑demand experience. Their MySQL master‑slave setup caused periodic downtime and rigid sharding limitations that blocked new features and degraded performance for a global user base that expects 24/7 access.

Coursera evaluated alternatives and chose Apache Cassandra delivered by DataStax for its masterless architecture, linear scalability, and reliable read/write performance. The migration enabled 24x7 on‑demand courses with reduced downtime, faster time‑to‑market for new features, multi‑data‑center expansion plans, and an increasing number of courses already running on the new platform.

Coursera

Daniel Chia

Software Engineer