If Khan Academy uses Youtube to serve their video and uses Fastly to serve static content, what makes it hard to scale ?
I mean being able to scale that easily is a great thing, but is there anything worth sharing with the world in their case ?
I mean being able to scale that easily is a great thing, but is there anything worth sharing with the world in their case ?
A lot of people seem to think of Khan Academy as a bunch of videos. Many have also seen the exercises and articles. Those things are all pretty static (though it gets more complex when you consider how much content there is and how many languages it's localized into).
There's a whole bunch of dynamic behavior around that static content. Keeping track of progress to tell a learner how they're doing, plus to help recommend the next place to go in the content. Reporting on progress to parents and teachers. Letting teachers create assignments and manage their classrooms. Bubbling up information to school districts.
Content pages have discussions and clarifications. There are notifications to tell students about new assignments, for example.
There are connections to tests, like the SAT prep or integration with the MAP test, which involve connecting our accounts with external accounts in order to help students based on those test results.
And a bunch of other stuff that isn't coming to mind right now because I'm just naming things off the top of my head.
Doing all these things across a user base of millions of monthly users can get quite involved.
In the blog post Marta said:
> In the month of April, we served 30 million learners on our platform
How much did it cost to run this whole stack on GCP in April 2020? Was it $150,000? More or less?
I will say that the amount we pay for our infrastructure, especially right now, is reduced by generous support from both Fastly and Google. It still remains a substantial expense after that support.
One final note on cost: we are actively working on a Python to Go transition[1] that will reduce our hosting costs, among other benefits.
To turn it around, why would you ever want someone to not share their experience with the world if they took time to write it down? It's not like you must read it; it doesn't cost you anything to exist. But if someone's experience adds to the library of human knowledge, even a little bit, why would one try to reject that?
There's a reason other non profits like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive run their own hardware, networking, and connectivity to transit providers. And before the "doing that is expensive!" argument comes up, note how expensive having someone else do these things are. Lots of margin built into cloud services.
My contribution is that I am helping with automating video uploads to the team youtube channel, which is allowed to have "Kahn Academy {language}" branding.
Shameless plug: If any google or youtube employees can help me raise our API quota please get in touch!!! :)
Kthxby
Khan Academy doesn't have infinite money.
Some companies need to take a much harder look at their spend than others regardless of where you deploy.
There's only really one sensible way to do it, and that's the way it's done.
It's sort of like someone asking how you rebuild the stock carburetor on a 1967 Mustang, and replying "Make an educated guess about the design of youtubes serving infrastructure, and I'm pretty certain you're right." For the vast majority of people, that's no use at all.