Case Study: Udacity achieves efficient cloud cost control with DoiT International

How Udacity manages cloud costs while delivering effective upskilling

Udacity, an online learning provider in the education sector, needed to manage massive and highly variable cloud demand while keeping costs under control. Supporting 50,000 to 60,000 students required between 100,000 and 200,000 virtual machines per day, with sudden spikes of thousands of VMs in minutes, so the company relied on Google Cloud compute and Kubernetes infrastructure and worked with DoiT International to monitor and optimize spend.

DoiT International helped Udacity identify waste, catch spending anomalies quickly, and improve cloud efficiency, including alerting the team to a bug that was causing thousands of detached SSDs to accumulate. With DoiT’s guidance, Udacity switched to balanced persistent disks and saved 75% on drive costs, while also avoiding costly surprises and freeing engineers to focus on core product work. The partnership helped Udacity scale reliably and support 30% growth in enterprise business since the pandemic began.

Udacity

Will Kessler

Director of Engineering