How Udacity manages cloud costs while delivering effective upskilling

January 2021

Technology-focused online learning provider scales 100,000-200,000 VMs daily while optimizing cloud spend with DoiT's proactive cost management

75%: savings on drives
30%: enterprise growth

“DoiT has been central to our success with Google Cloud. They frequently reach out to us when spikes in spending occur, and they are incredibly responsive to our needs, typically finding solutions to our problems in 30 minutes or less.”
Will Kessler
Director of Engineering, Udacity

The Challenge

Udacity needed to manage enormous fluctuations in VM demand, sometimes seeing spikes of 2,000-3,000 VMs accessed in minutes. The company required extremely efficient IT spending to keep student costs low while maintaining highly-reliable services for their online learning platform.

The Solution

Udacity partnered with DoiT International for proactive cloud spend management on Google Cloud. DoiT provides real-time alerts for cost spikes, identifies optimization opportunities, and delivers solutions typically within 30 minutes. The partnership includes custom auto-scaling solutions and continuous monitoring of compute resources.

Results

Achieved 75% cost savings on drives by switching to balanced persistent disks
Experienced 30% enterprise business growth since the pandemic began
Enabled seamless management of VM activity surges and demand spikes
Freed up engineering time to focus on core education business rather than IT maintenance

Meeting massive scale demands

Udacity serves between 50,000 and 60,000 students whose support requires the use of 100,000 to 200,000 VMs every day. The company sometimes sees spikes of anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 VMs accessed in minutes. Google Compute Engine powers the VMs, and Google Kubernetes Engine is built into the hypervisor infrastructure to assist with managing and maintaining systems, helping the company handle surges with minimal or no disruption.

Proactive cost optimization

DoiT proactively informs Udacity when there are opportunities to reduce costs while maintaining the same functionality across compute resources. For example, DoiT once noticed the tripling of SSD costs over just a few days, alerted Udacity, and discovered the issue was related to SSDs becoming detached and not properly deleted. DoiT also recommended balanced persistent disks, which saved Udacity 75 percent on drives since making the change.

Supporting growth during challenging times

Throughout the pandemic, Udacity has seen large demand for nanodegrees as people want to learn skills that enable them to continue earning income while working remotely. Enterprise customers are increasing their investment in employee learning. One of Udacity's largest enterprise customers had employees complete an analytics nanodegree, and one student used that knowledge to identify efficiencies that could yield as much as $10 million in savings annually.

Enabling business focus

All of the work completed with Google Cloud and DoiT positioned Udacity to seamlessly manage activity surges and spikes in demand. Regardless of how quickly the company needs to scale up or down its VMs and SSDs, Google Cloud provides the requisite power and flexibility while DoiT maintains a close eye on spend, use, and opportunities for further optimization. This allows engineers and staff to focus on core business of educating professionals rather than IT maintenance.

Expanding into new specialties

Empowered with the right technologies and an efficient model for cloud spending, Udacity is expanding its nanodegree programs into even more areas. The organization is working on approaches to enable on-the-fly skills assessments and mapping while greatly personalizing learning experiences. Google Cloud and DoiT provide the agility needed to support increasing future demands and tap into analytics and microservices tools.

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Story overview

What they say

DoiT was a true partner, not a vendor. They helped us understand the problem, refine the vision, and build something production-ready far faster than we could have on our own. Their expertise, responsiveness, and commitment made all the difference.

Dr. Anish Kapur, Founder & CEO, Promptly

DoiT's Customer Success and Forward Deployed Engineering teams work very closely with us. The regular sessions with our CSM keep us focused on the right priorities, and the FDEs provide the deep technical guidance we need to validate decisions and optimize our environment. That combination has been genuinely valuable for us.

Alexander Lundberg Santos, Platform Engineer at Extenda Retail

When we started working with DoiT, we deployed Flexsave to save time and reduce complexity. We still use it today. But what really stands out is the expert support. Having someone to collaborate with on deep cloud cost topics, someone who really understands the nuances, is incredibly valuable.

Jesper Terkelsen, CTO at Monta

DoiT's Cloud Accelerator turned our AI idea into a shipped product, saving at least three months of development and delivering reliable, explainable insights our customers trust.

Scott Desgrosseilliers, CEO and co-founder, Wicked Reports

DaySmart

Working with DoiT gave us the speed of a startup and the rigor of an enterprise R&D lab. We launched an AI feature in ninety days with zero engineering lift, unified our cloud visibility across multiple products and built a foundation to scale AI responsibly.

Tim Green, SVP of AI, DaySmart

Our AWS environment had grown rapidly, and complexity was outpacing control. DoiT helped us bring structure and clarity, aligning financial and technical decisions through a shared foundation.

Maurizio Trezzi, Director of IT, Vivaticket

DoiT gives us contextual insight into what's happening in our cloud environment. That helps us ensure we're meeting customer needs while managing our costs. It's that central pane of glass that lets engineering and finance work together, powered by the technology and backed by DoiT's people.

Matt Warner, Co-Founder and CEO at Blumira

For anyone considering DoiT: do it. The tools pay for themselves. We've reduced costs, improved visibility, and built a platform that can scale globally with control and confidence.

Matej Serbec, CTO, TradeLocker

DoiT didn't just give us a product – they gave us clarity. Cloud Diagrams has helped our teams understand what we're running, why we're running it, and where we can improve. The real-time visibility is a game changer for engineering, leadership, and everything in between.

Donnie Green, VP of Platform Engineering, Bloomerang

Sentric Music

With maybe 5-10 minutes, Ava had guided me right down into the low-level detail of the services that we were running in our compute environment, named the exact instances that were starting to chew through our money, produced a report for me that showed that this was almost a direct correlation to the cost growth that we were seeing, which meant that we were able to get on top of it pretty much immediately.

Stephen Roughley, Head of Engineering at Sentric Music

Atadex

With DoiT Cloud Intelligence™ managing our procurement and DoiT's engineers acting as an extension of my team, my costs are down, my efficiency is up, and my profitability is up

Mitch Bernet, Founder and CEO at Atadex

Skyral

A key takeaway for me working with DoiT is that the level of professionalism is extremely high. They're an obvious choice if you're looking for a partner to help implement best practices in your cloud environment and reduce cost.

Oliver Young, Senior Technical Manager at Skyral

We knew WhatsApp was the perfect channel for global remittances, but building secure, real-time conversations across languages was a massive challenge. DoiT helped us break through. They didn't just advise, they helped us architect and launch a GenAI solution that's 100x more powerful than what we had. We're now in a completely different league.

Jaime Gonzalez-Gasque, CEO, Reimagination Technologies

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