Cassandra, a scalable NoSQL database, powers the majority of Coursera’s online request processing. Cassandra affords us horizontal scalability, stable and fast latencies, and no downtime maintenance. These aspects allow us to provide our learners that are distributed globally a feature-rich...

Building a platform for quality education at scale is much more challenging than it initially appears. One of the most sophisticated components of Coursera’s learning platform is our programming assignments infrastructure. We efficiently, reliably, and securely grade assignment submissions inside...

What’s up with this old-to-new platform switch? What’s different about Coursera’s new platform? In this blog post, Director of Engineering Jiquan Ngiam shares and reflects on how our technical platform has evolved over the last few years. When Coursera launched,...

What is it like to work in the Analytics organization at Coursera? Three years ago, I wrote a Quora answer describing what was then the Analytics engineering team at Coursera. In this post, I'll describe where we are today and provide some reflections on the past and future of Analytics at Coursera.

This is a two part blog series about how Coursera migrated from EC2 Classic to VPC. This post highlights general strategies and service migration, while the next post will deal with migrating our storage subsystems. Why VPC? As Coursera grows,...