Quizlet Success Story
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Riverbed Stingray load balancers
- Percona database images
- Apache
- PHP
- Memcached
- Sphinx
Tech Stack
- JavaScript / AJAX
- SmartOS cloud operating system
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Digital Expertise
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
About The Customer
Quizlet is the world’s largest flashcards and study games website. The company has grown significantly from 100 beta users in 2007 at launch to 6 million monthly unique visitors consuming over 80 million page views. Information on Quizlet ranges from middle school social studies to university-level Arabic to GRE prep. Quizlet is free to users and ad supported. From middle school students to medical residents, Quizlet’s users have created over 7 million flash card sets incorporating more than 200 million terms and definitions. Built by founder Andrew Sutherland in 2005 as a way to study for his high-school French class, Quizlet now includes advanced progressive learning tools that identify and emphasize knowledge areas where the user is weaker. This speeds the learning process.
The Challenge
Quizlet, a rapidly growing online study platform, was seeking a cloud platform to build its business on. The company required a solution that offered data reliability and 100% uptime, superior analytics tools for faster page loads, premium hardware in the data center, and responsive support. The company's users would be accessing the site from various devices and locations, exposing them to a diverse set of data delivery and network conditions. Therefore, Quizlet needed to quickly analyze and troubleshoot any application latencies to tune apps for high-speed page delivery. The company also wanted to ensure proactive fixes for any problem to prevent cascading failures that affect end users.
The Solution
Quizlet decided to build their business on the Joyent cloud starting with their first beta build in 2007. The company presently uses a high availability, low-latency cloud infrastructure that can easily handle bursts in traffic. Quizlet deploys a diverse cluster of more than a dozen Joyent instances and images. All the instances run Joyent’s SmartOS cloud operating system. The Quizlet stack includes two Riverbed Stingray load balancers and two Percona database images that snapshot data without coming out of production. Quizlet further deploys seven other instance virtual compute nodes including Web servers Apache, PHP, Memcached and a search engine tool (Sphinx). The company uses JavaScript / AJAX for client-side compute tasks.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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