The good news is, when you’re done and scale down, you don’t pay but you are paying for that bubble in the transition. “Auto-scaling is expensive but it’s how this all works, you deflate and there is some redundancy built in and you’re paying for the resource you use as you go up and down.
The other thing is that it’s more expensive because of autoscaling but the beauty of running at the scale we do with a team of five engineers doing devops and eighty-five site engineers is huge, everyone else is developing code and product,” Kosarchyn explains. Not to say we’d move off App Engine but it’s a consideration.
It’s not easy to change serverless and that’s part of it. “Thing is about serverless is that you are hooked in that platform pretty tightly, that’s one of the tradeoffs. Much of this is because no one is worrying about infrastructure and auto-scaling, while not cheap, lets them stay focused. The thing is, when something is working, especially for a product-focused non-profit with massive scale, change doesn’t come easy, nor is it always welcome.īig transitions for a live product are difficult but Kosarchyn says out of all of them she’s seen in her 30 years (senior manager for R&D at HP Labs, director of product development at Intuit, etc.) the shift away from Python to Go, mostly for performance reasons, went smoothly. Containers came along later as well, which offered some options for getting around the lock-in of serverless but it wasn’t until the last couple of years Khan Academy deployed those, although mostly to help onboard new developers quickly. In 2009, when Khan Academy made its debut, AWS EC2 was available, so they did have options. And while there are some tradeoffs in terms of cost and flexibility, it let them focus on meeting demand rather than rushing to hire legions of infrastructure engineers as other companies had to do in 2020.
One of the reasons Khan Academy could stay focused on the product instead of scrambling for scalability was because of the serverless approach they grew up on. All of this hit during a critical phase in an organization-wise migration from Python to Go as the base (along with GraphQL and other tools). Like so many education-centric companies, Khan Academy faced a rapid uptick in scale during the pandemic, with 3X growth in users almost overnight, according to CTO and VP of Engineering Marta Kosarchyn. The non-profit, which features a wide range of learning tools and content for 20 million engaged users per month, was one of the first customers for Google App Engine (a decade before we graced with the word “serverless”) and while there are some tradeoffs and new technologies that could make a shift possible, they’re planning to stay the App Engine course. There are few companies with a better handle on the pros and cons of serverless than learning hub, Khan Academy.
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