Case Study: Khan Academy achieves scalable 3.8M monthly visits and simplified operations with Google Cloud Platform

The Khan Academy Scales and Simplifies with Google App Engine

Khan Academy, the non‑profit that offers free online educational videos and practice exercises, needed to relaunch its website on a platform that could scale with rapid growth. With rising traffic and media attention, the team wanted to outsource server maintenance and focus engineering resources on improving the user experience rather than infrastructure.

They moved KhanAcademy.org to Google App Engine, which removed the need for a dedicated sysadmin and let the small development team concentrate on product features and analytics. The platform reliably supports 3.8 million unique monthly visits, about 1.5 million practice questions answered each school day, student progress profiles, easy daily deployments, and seamless handling of traffic spikes.

Khan Academy

Ben Kamens

Lead developer